The skybox is grey. Not the grey of rain, the grey of corpses, broken open in gashes by the bleach of exploding stars. My opponent sits across from me, eyeing the board. There were formalities upon formalities, one preceding the other ad nauseam until I suspected V was playing some childish game to establish some measure of dominance. But in time I realized I was receiving an impactful picture of how he operated, and the tiers of power he utilized to keep his vast domain under control, and so I held back my complaints, though the day wore on and I desired rest. Before I was shown my room, I was invited to dine with him and his innermost coterie. I wanted to decline, but there was a faint klaxon sounding in all directions, and I seemed to be the only one aware of it, so I accepted.

It was a round table, to my surprise, and I was seated by two others who were visibly nervous. The man to my left, who named himself Titus, had been apprentice to Doctor Danders once upon a time, and was divulging much to me of the good doctor's dream of Tarthas Remade. When he began to speak of the brutes who murdered him so that Jadus's quacks could hold a monopoly on medicine, the woman, named Kira, corrected him, reminding him that Lord V's official word was that Danders was killed by one of his own patients, and that he, the doctor's apprentice, had all the good doctor's gifts with none of his mania, and would bring the good doctor's vision in line with Their Lord's.

"Not all is lost, then," said Titus..

"In fact, all is gained," said Kira.

"A great man fell," said Titus.

"So that another might rise", said Kira.

They prattled on, and my stomach churned. Then I felt a gentle touch and inclined my head. Behind me was a soft-skinned boy in tight, velvet clothes.

"His Decadence would like for you to sit by him," said the soft-skinned boy in his soft-skinned voice.

I looked at fat Pothos in his excessively plush chair with its gem encrusted arms, carved in the shape of corpulent snakes with massive eggs in their mouths.

"He has cleared the space next to him."

I ponder over the immensity of his jowls, and wonder how much food could be dumped into his cheeks and forgotten.

"It is an honor."

Get too fat, and no woman will want to lay with you.

"Master Pothos is one of the most influential of the satraps..."

I did not realize it mattered if they wanted to.

"... would be a terrible mistake..."

I will not harbor a rapist.

"... blah blah blah, blah blah, blah."

Soldiers do their duty, masterful radix. Are you a murderer for commanding your armies to sally forth into battle? I give my soldiers orders and they follow them, with no more regard for my physical appearance than any other general's.

I wanted to leave, to retire early and plan my escape and return to the Painted Lady, or perhaps to Red Side to help them fight the fomorians, but then I remembered that Tythus and the Judicator were both dead. And then, with no memory of walking or standing or any other action, I was sitting next to Pothos, who was explaining how indignant his attache was when asked to vacate his seat.

"I'll have him replaced, naturally. I don't tolerate insubordination. It's death if you do."

He made faint sounds with his spit while he talked, a habit I can't abide. Then I saw V, and he looked perturbed. He sat between the preeminent of the Dagons and Valkyr, and they both looked at him with furrowed brows.

"Great Urizen," said the Dagon, "why do you now speak his name? Why do you speak of..." I strained to hear. I thought the man said 'Turk'. Then I was taken in by the clothing he and the Valkyr officials wore. Her clothing was scant, but elaborate, being a collection of metallic crescents and oiled chains. He were on opulent golden robe which emanated a variable chain of symbols down each sleeve. Beneath the rivers of hieroglyphs were djinn who writhed in torment, shackled so tightly by profane binding words.

"Magnificent, aren't they?" Pothos asked. He too was garbed, though his scarlett robe was not fully fastened. I was nauseated by the sight of his pasty, hairless flesh. He said many things that evening, and while I did not commit them to memory, I slept that night with visions of imprisonment, and receiving help from a strange source. I woke surrounded by V and armed men whose harness hid both their faces and the full shape of their bodies. Directly above me, on the high vaulted ceiling of my bedchamber, were two of the spider women. One's thorax was swollen and covered in nonferrous silk.

I rose, sluggishly, having eaten for the first time in ages. I looked weak then, to V's eyes. Seeing myself so I could feel his contempt, though my apathy screamed louder in his ears.

"I've something to show you," he said. Belial's hot breath rose in my nostrils.

I was allowed to dress in my armor and shroud, but when I reached for my spear, V spoke.

"You will not need weapons here, and there are none that could protect you."

I took it all the same, if nothing else than to frustrate my predecessor.

We went to a moving rode that stretched out for miles, then rose suddenly, its angle contrived so that we never felt the steepness of its incline. Our enigmatic guard followed us through an illusory wall into a foyer of sorts. It was made of smooth white stone, with three rows of twelve foot tall statues, each of a robed woman on the floor in a state of childbirth. At the end of the foyer was a lone door, tall and narrow. Through it we walked, to an audience chamber where men in brown were being questioned by women in grey. All dropped to the floor at the sight of their lord, and a few dared confused stares at me as I strode beside him. This room had many doors lining the walls, each at the end of a path that shot straight between fences of arrow-tipped iron rods. Valkyr in battle dress stood and the beginning of each fenced path.

Our way was straight, and at its end we came to an immense facility that reminded me of Labor pool 9. I said so to V, and he stopped, shook his head angrily towards me, then resumed his march. I lagged behind until after waft moving forward and upward for a very long time, we were standing over a chasm that dropped infinitely into blackness. Then I was not pushed, but bidden to drop, and when we were both done traversing that omnichromatic limbo we were in a silo of glossy black polymer. V spoke a word and the silo rose. We were in the hangar where the pegasi were once stabled. There were a few broken ones being cannibalized, and one or two others that while wounded looked as if they could still fly. And there, back in his roost, was Northwind.

I neglected to write of his hiding place, and how I'd cultivated such a report with his saddle mounted djinn that I could give very detailed and customized commands. I told him to fly low when approached, and to rotate between a number of specified hiding places. Yet here he was, back in V's possession.

"You've corrupted it," he said. "It no longer knows my voice. It's no matter. I'll send a dactyl, and see through its eyes. Go. Fly. My outriders await you in the sky. You will follow them to our goal, our true path. When you return, if you wish, you will serve the Dagons, and in their service you will learn all you wish to know of the Fall, the Four, the Bellringers and the Batch."

Northwind was glad for our reunion. He whickered loudly as we lifted upward, and this time, unlike the last, we rose through a portal in the ceiling. There the others waited, guns trained on us. I did not fear myself, as always, but I feared for my mount, so I followed my escort to a channel cut deep in the magnacity's interior structure. We exited from a blank space in the vast western wall and flew low over the ashen plains beyond. V's dactyl showed itself then. It emerged from an ash storm and banked hard to the left, then leveled out after a sharp curve and flew above me. Its wings were narrow and long, turbines whining like so many embattled hornets. Its round head spun constantly on its swivel, mapping every surface below and cloud surrounding, and its long, slender talons flexed beneath its belly as we cruised.

It felt good to look upon the warscape again. I had felt so stifled inside Thirty-Third Day, especially in the oversized vaults Lord V and his enslaved elite dwelled within.

"Your spear," V said over the comms.

"Behind the saddle," I replied.

"You've named it?"

I shook my head, then laughed, as if a person who spoke remotely could see my gesture. "Of course not."

"And why not?"

"Morons name their weapons."

"And their mounts?"

"Northwind has a mind and a soul."

"It has a djinn, which you've mistaken for those sacred things."

"Well, I've named the steed, not the djinn."

"Just as well. The djinn have their own names, and wont answer to anything else."

I was only half listening to V. The warscape flowed beneath me, and I was taking in the shattered ruins and blasted hills. The Sun glowed dirty orange above, though the sky's murk seemed thicker than normal.

"I want yo to say your weapon's name, and tell me what happens."

I shook my head again. "I told you I never named it."

"Your weapon is not the spear, but the spirit bound to it. That spirit was named at birth. Say it's name, and tell me what happens."

I sighed, and oddly a name came summoned to my lips. "Aleph." I kept my eyes fixed ahead, but Northwind's saddle chamber was filled for an instant with brilliant light.

There was static on the comms.

"It lit up. Satisfied?"

The warscape rolled on, far more wrecked here on the southern island.

"Longinus," said V. "It's name is Longinus."

I said that name and nothing happened. Through his silence I could feel the grief peculiar to those heeding of empty relics. "Aleph yielded a result, Longinus did not. But I ask you, what significance could a weapon bear that grants it a name? It's the hand that wields it that matters."

Through the static of the comms, V made mention of the difference between one tool and another, and how one can fell both corpses and trees with an axe, then something about a spear being a key. But his monologue was cut short by our destination. Maybe there was some distortion coming from his dactyl or his followers, or the land we entered, or maybe it was a residual effect of my sudden introduction to the Stylus, but I cannot remember the progression of time, other than that it took place. And there we were at the old hellmouth. In Elvedon, I glimpsed what Tomorrow Gives Her Hope described to me, but that was only the saurian arrival point. Where V had driven me was where Wrath herself fell, laying waste to the world before Tarthas with penultimate judgement. Her wall circled round what was once a warrior's city named Gore, the hellmouth gaped wide across an expanse of broken land, and like a snake, or maybe a pair of arms, she wrapped around upon herself far into the sea.

More static. There is a tunnel... But I followed my escort in advance of V's commands. The tunnel itself was large enough to swallow whole the exit wounds left by Pandemonium. A sickly green light filled the dark space of its throat, spilling out in a murky white haze. We dove, and when I saw metal platforms and long bunkers at its base I thought we would be landing at some installation, looking down into the abyss from a safe vantage point. But no. We flew headlong into the murky white haze and through the pale green light, then past it into darkness, and again time became detached from my mind as I cycled through the Victors, retaining only one memory I knew to fully be mine. Between fangs of ancient ore and curtains of calcified moss that were so large they could have been draped over all of Haven, we rode hard, and when Northwind whimpered for want of a drink, we reared our steeds to a halt and dismounted.

"Stay within the cooling aura," said the shortest and meanest of my escort. Muscaro was his name. His face was wrapped in goggles and cloth, but I could tell that was stone hard and bones old. I followed him to the edge of a faint cyan glow, which I foolishly stuck my fingers through. I wailed from my pain, seeing the tips of my fingers and the fibres of my gauntlets scorched to nothing. I clutched at my hand, and while I'm certain Muscaro was angry with me for my stupidity, there was a sympathetic tilt to his head while I held my hand to my chest, in far too much pain to form any words, wheezing pathetically. Algea, I thought I knew you.

When my fingers had regrown and were covered with skin, I stepped to the edge of the cooling aura and looked down the grooved lip of the cave. Far below us was a pool of scarlet light that frightened me. Attendants had watered our horses, so we were able to leave those sullied depths behind without delay. When I was again in his presence, Lord V spoke blasphemy.

"Now, you have seen the sun."

The skybox is grey. Not the grey of rain, the grey of corpses, broken open in gashes by the bleach of exploding stars. My opponent sits across from me, eyeing the board. There were formalities upon formalities, one preceding the other ad nauseam until I suspected V was playing some childish game to establish some measure of dominance. But in time I realized I was receiving an impactful picture of how he operated, and the tiers of power he utilized to keep his vast domain under control, and so I held back my complaints, though the day wore on and I desired rest. Before I was shown my room, I was invited to dine with him and his innermost coterie. I wanted to decline, but there was a faint klaxon sounding in all directions, and I seemed to be the only one aware of it, so I accepted.

It was a round table, to my surprise, and I was seated by two others who were visibly nervous. The man to my left, who named himself Titus, had been apprentice to Doctor Danders once upon a time, and was divulging much to me of the good doctor's dream of Tarthas Remade. When he began to speak of the brutes who murdered him so that Jadus's quacks could hold a monopoly on medicine, the woman, named Kira, corrected him, reminding him that Lord V's official word was that Danders was killed by one of his own patients, and that he, the doctor's apprentice, had all the good doctor's gifts with none of his mania, and would bring the good doctor's vision in line with Their Lord's.

"Not all is lost, then," said Titus..

"In fact, all is gained," said Kira.

"A great man fell," said Titus.

"So that another might rise", said Kira.

They prattled on, and my stomach churned. Then I felt a gentle touch and inclined my head. Behind me was a soft-skinned boy in tight, velvet clothes.

"His Decadence would like for you to sit by him," said the soft-skinned boy in his soft-skinned voice.

I looked at fat Pothos in his excessively plush chair with its gem encrusted arms, carved in the shape of corpulent snakes with massive eggs in their mouths.

"He has cleared the space next to him."

I ponder over the immensity of his jowls, and wonder how much food could be dumped into his cheeks and forgotten.

"It is an honor."

Get too fat, and no woman will want to lay with you.

"Master Pothos is one of the most influential of the satraps..."

I did not realize it mattered if they wanted to.

"... would be a terrible mistake..."

I will not harbor a rapist.

"... blah blah blah, blah blah, blah."

Soldiers do their duty, masterful radix. Are you a murderer for commanding your armies to sally forth into battle? I give my soldiers orders and they follow them, with no more regard for my physical appearance than any other general's.

I wanted to leave, to retire early and plan my escape and return to the Painted Lady, or perhaps to Red Side to help them fight the fomorians, but then I remembered that Tythus and the Judicator were both dead. And then, with no memory of walking or standing or any other action, I was sitting next to Pothos, who was explaining how indignant his attache was when asked to vacate his seat.

"I'll have him replaced, naturally. I don't tolerate insubordination. It's death if you do."

He made faint sounds with his spit while he talked, a habit I can't abide. Then I saw V, and he looked perturbed. He sat between the preeminent of the Dagons and Valkyr, and they both looked at him with furrowed brows.

"Great Urizen," said the Dagon, "why do you now speak his name? Why do you speak of..." I strained to hear. I thought the man said 'Turk'. Then I was taken in by the clothing he and the Valkyr officials wore. Her clothing was scant, but elaborate, being a collection of metallic crescents and oiled chains. He were on opulent golden robe which emanated a variable chain of symbols down each sleeve. Beneath the rivers of hieroglyphs were djinn who writhed in torment, shackled so tightly by profane binding words.

"Magnificent, aren't they?" Pothos asked. He too was garbed, though his scarlett robe was not fully fastened. I was nauseated by the sight of his pasty, hairless flesh. He said many things that evening, and while I did not commit them to memory, I slept that night with visions of imprisonment, and receiving help from a strange source. I woke surrounded by V and armed men whose harness hid both their faces and the full shape of their bodies. Directly above me, on the high vaulted ceiling of my bedchamber, were two of the spider women. One's thorax was swollen and covered in nonferrous silk.

I rose, sluggishly, having eaten for the first time in ages. I looked weak then, to V's eyes. Seeing myself so I could feel his contempt, though my apathy screamed louder in his ears.

"I've something to show you," he said. Belial's hot breath rose in my nostrils.

I was allowed to dress in my armor and shroud, but when I reached for my spear, V spoke.

"You will not need weapons here, and there are none that could protect you."

I took it all the same, if nothing else than to frustrate my predecessor.

We went to a moving rode that stretched out for miles, then rose suddenly, its angle contrived so that we never felt the steepness of its incline. Our enigmatic guard followed us through an illusory wall into a foyer of sorts. It was made of smooth white stone, with three rows of twelve foot tall statues, each of a robed woman on the floor in a state of childbirth. At the end of the foyer was a lone door, tall and narrow. Through it we walked, to an audience chamber where men in brown were being questioned by women in grey. All dropped to the floor at the sight of their lord, and a few dared confused stares at me as I strode beside him. This room had many doors lining the walls, each at the end of a path that shot straight between fences of arrow-tipped iron rods. Valkyr in battle dress stood and the beginning of each fenced path.

Our way was straight, and at its end we came to an immense facility that reminded me of Labor pool 9. I said so to V, and he stopped, shook his head angrily towards me, then resumed his march. I lagged behind until after waft moving forward and upward for a very long time, we were standing over a chasm that dropped infinitely into blackness. Then I was not pushed, but bidden to drop, and when we were both done traversing that omnichromatic limbo we were in a silo of glossy black polymer. V spoke a word and the silo rose. We were in the hangar where the pegasi were once stabled. There were a few broken ones being cannibalized, and one or two others that while wounded looked as if they could still fly. And there, back in his roost, was Northwind.

I neglected to write of his hiding place, and how I'd cultivated such a report with his saddle mounted djinn that I could give very detailed and customized commands. I told him to fly low when approached, and to rotate between a number of specified hiding places. Yet here he was, back in V's possession.

"You've corrupted it," he said. "It no longer knows my voice. It's no matter. I'll send a dactyl, and see through its eyes. Go. Fly. My outriders await you in the sky. You will follow them to our goal, our true path. When you return, if you wish, you will serve the Dagons, and in their service you will learn all you wish to know of the Fall, the Four, the Bellringers and the Batch."

Northwind was glad for our reunion. He whickered loudly as we lifted upward, and this time, unlike the last, we rose through a portal in the ceiling. There the others waited, guns trained on us. I did not fear myself, as always, but I feared for my mount, so I followed my escort to a channel cut deep in the magnacity's interior structure. We exited from a blank space in the vast western wall and flew low over the ashen plains beyond. V's dactyl showed itself then. It emerged from an ash storm and banked hard to the left, then leveled out after a sharp curve and flew above me. Its wings were narrow and long, turbines whining like so many embattled hornets. Its round head spun constantly on its swivel, mapping every surface below and cloud surrounding, and its long, slender talons flexed beneath its belly as we cruised.

It felt good to look upon the warscape again. I had felt so stifled inside Thirty-Third Day, especially in the oversized vaults Lord V and his enslaved elite dwelled within.

"Your spear," V said over the comms.

"Behind the saddle," I replied.

"You've named it?"

I shook my head, then laughed, as if a person who spoke remotely could see my gesture. "Of course not."

"And why not?"

"Morons name their weapons."

"And their mounts?"

"Northwind has a mind and a soul."

"It has a djinn, which you've mistaken for those sacred things."

"Well, I've named the steed, not the djinn."

"Just as well. The djinn have their own names, and wont answer to anything else."

I was only half listening to V. The warscape flowed beneath me, and I was taking in the shattered ruins and blasted hills. The Sun glowed dirty orange above, though the sky's murk seemed thicker than normal.

"I want yo to say your weapon's name, and tell me what happens."

I shook my head again. "I told you I never named it."

"Your weapon is not the spear, but the spirit bound to it. That spirit was named at birth. Say it's name, and tell me what happens."

I sighed, and oddly a name came summoned to my lips. "Aleph." I kept my eyes fixed ahead, but Northwind's saddle chamber was filled for an instant with brilliant light.

There was static on the comms.

"It lit up. Satisfied?"

The warscape rolled on, far more wrecked here on the southern island.

"Longinus," said V. "It's name is Longinus."

I said that name and nothing happened. Through his silence I could feel the grief peculiar to those heeding of empty relics. "Aleph yielded a result, Longinus did not. But I ask you, what significance could a weapon bear that grants it a name? It's the hand that wields it that matters."

Through the static of the comms, V made mention of the difference between one tool and another, and how one can fell both corpses and trees with an axe, then something about a spear being a key. But his monologue was cut short by our destination. Maybe there was some distortion coming from his dactyl or his followers, or the land we entered, or maybe it was a residual effect of my sudden introduction to the Stylus, but I cannot remember the progression of time, other than that it took place. And there we were at the old hellmouth. In Elvedon, I glimpsed what Tomorrow Gives Her Hope described to me, but that was only the saurian arrival point. Where V had driven me was where Wrath herself fell, laying waste to the world before Tarthas with penultimate judgement. Her wall circled round what was once a warrior's city named Gore, the hellmouth gaped wide across an expanse of broken land, and like a snake, or maybe a pair of arms, she wrapped around upon herself far into the sea.

More static. There is a tunnel... But I followed my escort in advance of V's commands. The tunnel itself was large enough to swallow whole the exit wounds left by Pandemonium. A sickly green light filled the dark space of its throat, spilling out in a murky white haze. We dove, and when I saw metal platforms and long bunkers at its base I thought we would be landing at some installation, looking down into the abyss from a safe vantage point. But no. We flew headlong into the murky white haze and through the pale green light, then past it into darkness, and again time became detached from my mind as I cycled through the Victors, retaining only one memory I knew to fully be mine. Between fangs of ancient ore and curtains of calcified moss that were so large they could have been draped over all of Haven, we rode hard, and when Northwind whimpered for want of a drink, we reared our steeds to a halt and dismounted.

"Stay within the cooling aura," said the shortest and meanest of my escort. Muscaro was his name. His face was wrapped in goggles and cloth, but I could tell that was stone hard and bones old. I followed him to the edge of a faint cyan glow, which I foolishly stuck my fingers through. I wailed from my pain, seeing the tips of my fingers and the fibres of my gauntlets scorched to nothing. I clutched at my hand, and while I'm certain Muscaro was angry with me for my stupidity, there was a sympathetic tilt to his head while I held my hand to my chest, in far too much pain to form any words, wheezing pathetically. Algea, I thought I knew you.

When my fingers had regrown and were covered with skin, I stepped to the edge of the cooling aura and looked down the grooved lip of the cave. Far below us was a pool of scarlet light that frightened me. Attendants had watered our horses, so we were able to leave those sullied depths behind without delay. When I was again in his presence, Lord V spoke blasphemy.

"Now, you have seen the sun."