She found herself in a cylinder, glass on all sides, closing at the bottom and narrowing at the top before the mouth. Liquid poured in and drowned her, dissolved her into it, made her a part of it until there was nothing left. She was discarded, shattered, broken. Every time she came back, she was in the cylinder, and it was filling again, and she was fading again into nothing.

The bottom of the bottle shattered, and she fell away in a million droplets. She landed on the ground, and she reformed as she froze. Snow fell, and her siblings wandered out from the cold, endless plains on which they were born. One by one, Arthur and Morganna and Tristan and Iseult and Elaine and little Percival broke apart, limbs falling off and decaying into blood and guts and organs, their heads cracking like eggshells and their brains as yokes, their hearts and intestines turning to ground meat turning to sludge turning to ash absorbing into the land. All her siblings coalesced in the earth, while she reformed into an agonizing crystalline creature, shards of glass weaving together until they’d created a perfect Gwen-sculpture, empty and fragile and full of jagged edges. Amidst the howling wind and driving snow, Gwen stood alone.

***

Reverberations of pain and terror shook Gwen awake, and she found a demon on her chest. It looked like her mother’s old pets: a gaunt, green creature with a crushed, warped face, hairless and barely four feet tall. Its claws and fangs were black, and its eyes were orange-red. It stood on her chest, leaning over with its claws dug into the skin between her neck and her chest. A mare, or mara, from German folklore. 

Gwen grabbed the mare by the back of its head, gripping the flabby skin and throwing it like a shot put through the hotel window. It shattered the glass and went flying to the ground. 

She collapsed back onto the bed, heaving and sighing and groping for air. She turned, and saw Quentin had a mare on his chest as well. She grabbed it and sent it to join its comrade before it could respond. She shook Quentin awake, and finally, after a few moments more than her anxiety would have liked, he rose. 

“Gwen!” he cried. “What’s happening? I was beneath the earth, being devoured by the undead reanimations of those I’d failed to save!”

“Mare,” Gwen said, cupping his face in her hands and pressing her forehead against his. “Nightmare-givers. Dream-eaters. You’re safe now.”

In the distance, an explosion pierced the night. Gwen fixed her gaze out the window- city hall that had just gone up in flames. 

Gwen pulled on her jeans and top and sneakers, started gathering up all her weapons while Quentin did the same. A harsh wrapping shook the door, and she stumbled over and looked through the keyhole to find Joshua. 

“Danny went to wake Lacy and Isabella,” Joshua said as he entered. “We need to move.”

Gwen nodded, and they gathered their belongings and launched into the hall. Gwen went in the direction of Lacy and Isabella’s room, only for a sudden shrieking to redirect her attention behind her. 

Ten ghouls stood at the end of the hall. They tore doors off their hinges and dragged hotel guests out from their rooms. Gwen pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees and fired her glock-seventeen one-handed into the skull of the nearest ghoul. It was a male, completely human in appearance save for bloodstains around his mouth. The bullet hit the creature’s nose and tore through his skull, and his companions charged Gwen, Quentin, and Joshua as soon as the recoil from her gun shoved her hand back. 

Quentin stood to Gwen’s right and fired off his sawed-off shotgun from the hip, the round taking a charging ghoul in the chest and causing it to topple to the ground, alive but stumbling. He fired a second round to the ghoul’s head while Gwen reloaded her glock and fired off two more rounds at ghouls further away. It became a shooting gallery, Quentin with his shotgun and Gwen with her glock, clearing the fourth floor hallway while Joshua stood behind with his swords keeping at bay the ghouls charging from the other direction. 

Lacy and Isabella were two floors up. They needed to get to them-

Screaming shattered the air- a child, by the sound of it. In the stairwell, down a flight, as ghouls advanced on her. 

Gwen went towards the scream without hesitation, and the others were close behind her. The girl she’d heard was maybe five years old, and a ghoul was looming above her hungrily. Gwen brought the handle of her gun into the back of the ghoul’s head, stunning him, then retrieved a k-bar from her hip and stabbed the ghoul in the forehead.The momentum kept her going, bounding down the stairs killing ghouls, gathering civilians into the pool between her, Joshua, and Quentin. They pushed forward until they were in the hotel lobby and out the door. 

They stood in front of the building, watching downtown burn. Fire and blood and smoke and terror saturated the area as her father’s pack of monsters delighted in their barbarous display. Gwen looked back to the hotel- Lacy was still in there. Isabella and Danny were still in there. She had to-

“Hello again, Guinevere,” rang a familiar vibrato. 

She pivoted. All other sensations slipped away, all other sights blurred as her eyes formed a tunnel around the sight of her father at the edge of the street. 

Alistair Albrecht looked no worse than when she’d last seen him; he’d had his dietary needs satisfied in the interim. His cloak billowed in the wind like the wings of a raven as it looked down upon the battlefield eager to indulge in its buffet. Everything else was gone. There was only the raven, looming large and hungry. 

Gwen didn’t hesitate. She ran at him, ignoring Quentin’s cries of protestation behind her. 

Alistair did the same, a feral smile sprouting on his face. 

“Todeshander!” Gwen cried as she slammed a fist into her father’s side. It met his shield, but she charged the attack once again and aimed for the same spot. Then again, again, again, until finally a blow landed and her father winced in pain and stumbled to the side. Gwen pulled her k-bar and swung at his hands, and he narrowly avoided his fingers being lopped off. He charged his own Todeshander, and Gwen jumped out of the way to avoid the glowing white fist. 

Behind her, Quentin and Joshua began escorting the civilians in the opposite direction. 

Good. 

Now there was only her and her target. Her and the raven.

“Blud messer!” Gwen said. The wound she’d put in her father’s ribs ruptured, and a swath of blood shot out and gathered into a wharncliffe knife as her father brought a hand down to her face. She slammed the blood-blade into his hand as it was an inch from her face. Her father grunted, then gave a maniacal cackle before sweeping Gwen’s leg out from under her and bringing a foot down into her gut. The wind was stolen from her, and she gasped desperately for air as the blood-blade shattered and her father brought the boot down on her again. She rolled out of the way with only a second to spare, then kept rolling to gain some distance. 

She lured her father up the street, towards a cemetery she’d seen on the way over. And when they were close enough, she tapped a hand to her chest and unleashed her Star. The white light flooded her with power and vitality; her wounds became less sharp, her exhaustion less overwhelming, her fear less paralyzing. 

Naturally, Alistair extended her the same courtesy. His Stars careened through the air without grace. “I am glad we can finally face each other as something approaching equals, my daughter,” Alistair said. 

“We’re not equals. We’ve never been equals, you son of a bitch.”

“Don’t talk about your father like that.”

“Stop doing that,” Gwen said. “Stop acting like you’ve ever been a parent.”

“I am a father.”

She cleared a swath of room in the side of her brain, letting a quarter of her conscious mind dedicate itself to forming the spell and pooling energy into it. “And all your children are dead except for me. As the most qualified living person on the subject, I’d say you’re bad enough you don’t deserve to call yourself a father.”

“Pffft. Right.”

She sent the beginnings of the spell towards the graveyard behind her on the left. “What are you chuckling about, old man?”

“Only you remain, eh? Are you sure about that?”

“Well I was there when all the others died, including Elaine rather recently, so that just leaves me.”

“Really? You saw all of your siblings die, you say?”

She hesitated. 

And she thought, and she thought, and she thought, until she recalled a familiar sight she’d noted upon first seeing them: eyes blue like the ocean on a clear day. 

Like her mother’s eyes.

Like Percival’s eyes, so unlike the rest of them. 

Danny’s eyes. 

Gwen gulped. She had to get to Lacy-

Her father raised a palm, and in it gathered a pulsing sphere of violet light. “Entropy,” he said, as he unleashed the blast of oblivion. 

“Toter engel!” she screamed, unleashing her attack with one hand. And with the other, summoning all her hate and rage and despair, she woke the dead and called them to her aid.