Wednesday, her hair tied into two messy knee-length pigtails and thick round glasses bouncing down her nose, skips along Alpha’s corridor with her hands locked behind her back. Afternoon sun pours through cedar lattice windows tangled with wild vines; her dark skin drinks in the honeyed light. Somewhere far from this hallway, Kohana laughs—and Wednesday’s heart goes still, then quick, then wild.

Kohana, with a sure hand and keen eye, has already loosed something at Wednesday’s chest. Where other arrows would glance away, Kohana’s affection finds the softest place and stays.

So this is love: cake-sweet and candy-sticky, warm like milk jelly and amber honey. To eat and be eaten. To be swallowed whole and want it.

“My chest feels like it’s going to explode,” Wednesday mutters. It is her heart—a girl-heart where a beast-heart should sit—whining and pining, full of want and intolerable longing. “What I wouldn’t give to see Miss Zhùróng again.”

At her fingertips, a fairy-tale mirror flowers into being: gold chrome, gloss-bright. With a delighted little twist of her hand, Wednesday opens a neat tear through fourth-dimensional space, stitching Alpha’s throne room to her corridor by a thread of glass.

Kohana appears in the mirror, speaking with Alpha. Wednesday presses her palm to the surface, as if she might slip through.

She smiles under her fingers, a secret, selfish curve of the mouth, muffling a giggle.

“It’s not really spying,” she tells the quiet hall. “Just… keeping her in sight. Is it so wicked, to steal another look?”

Hands clasped to her chest, eyes glued to the mirror, she walks. Her steps stay brisk and purposeful despite the fact she’s intruding on her Master’s privacy; want thuds through her like a heartbeat, flattening every other thought.

“Miss Zhùróng would simply take what she wants,” Wednesday decides. “I’ll be brave like that.” She puffs herself up, imagining scales and claws, a dragon swelling with hell and inferno.

To the retainer trimming a nearby planter, she looks more like a small bird fluffing its feathers or a little dog raising its hackles.

“Forgive me, Temperance, but are you well?” the servant asks, reaching out carefully, as if Wednesday might bolt.

“Eep!” Her face catches fire from chin to hairline. She squeezes her eyes shut. “D–don’t startle me like that! I’m fine, I’m fine,” she stammers, trying to yank her nerves back into order. “Please don’t tell Our Lord. Don’t tell Alpha!”

His name scrapes down her throat like shrapnel. Her body goes rigid. She clamps her mouth shut, mandibles of a Dracula ant closing on a too-bold syllable.

“I won’t,” the servant soothes with a small, pitying smile, slipping into the gentle cadence of someone used to coaxing distressed patients. “I haven’t heard you say anything at all.” Their curiosity wins through. “Are you in love?”

The question is blunter than they intended, so they chase it with a soft, nervous laugh.

“I—I’m not sure,” Wednesday whispers, cheeks blazing as she turns her back. “Powers aren’t meant to know such feelings, I don’t think.”

“Were you not made of Our Lord’s flesh and bone?” they ask, tone mild, almost kind.

She considers, then nods.

“Love is an impulse,” the servant says, turning toward a broadleaf maple with reddish-brown bark. Their lopping shears clip with neat, practiced cuts. Sap beads and runs, honey-thick and golden. “It doesn’t wait for permission. It will lose faith, lose trust, even hope, and still keep moving. It wants to endure. It means to be gentle and bashful, but it’s hungry. It takes. It yearns.”

Love leaves neither man nor beast untouched.

It spreads, it fills, it consumes.

Wednesday’s chest aches in answer—an ache without bottom, a hole that wants everything. Somewhere inside, something enormous shifts and snarls, teeth set on coronas and starfire, tongue heavy as an angel’s wing.

“You know so much about love,” she breathes. “It’s… amazing.”

“If I speak every mystery and know every secret, if I have faith enough to move mountains but lack love, I am nothing,” the servant replies, smiling so slightly she almost misses it. “It may surprise you, but from sun to waxing moon, no one has done a thing that wasn’t for love. I’ll tell you another secret: even our Lord has been besieged by it.”

“I don’t understand,” Wednesday says shyly, biting her lip. “Our Lady has been loyal to Him for eons.”

“Our Lady.” The servant’s tone goes dry as bone in desert sun. Wednesday recoils at the edge cutting their words. She feels small, childish, fingers creeping up to fidget with her red fringe. “Does the woman not deserve the dignity of her name? Poor Ashtoreth.”

“Y-yes, but… It’s uncouth to refer to our Sovereigns by name,” Wednesday manages.

The servant barks a rough laugh—rusty, abrasive, like sandpaper dragged over metal. “You’re right, in your own narrow way. Ashtoreth has been faithful. She was made for him. She was locked away.”

“I beg your pardon?” Wednesday squeaks. She knows this isn’t a conversation she should be having at all, much less with a gardener. She clasps and unclasps her hands, signaling her wish to stop and yet unable to step away.

“I am far too old for this. Must I tell you the maiden-in-a-tower story again?” the servant snaps. “The man, the woman, the garden, the exile. You’ve heard it enough to recite it backwards. Call it myth, call it history—it’s both, and neither.”

“But you don’t look so old—”

“It is your nature,” they say, flicking a hand, “to marry things. Man and woman, life and death, god and consort. You sort what cannot be sorted.”

“I don’t think about any of that—”

She tries to protest, but the servant plants their hands on their hips.

“Tch. Your god should have given you some backbone. Find it yourself, girl.”

“I am not a girl.” It comes out in one rushed breath.

Their mouth twists. “No? A boy like me, then? A mongrel?”

The air curdles. Shadows thicken and knit around the servant’s body, swallowing the neat gardener’s lines. When they fade, Wednesday sees thick, weather-beaten brown skin dappled with tags and spots, heavy dark brows, and one eye milky, the other cinnamon-bright.

“I jest,” they say. “You’re centuries old. That makes it worse, not better. You’ve had time to demand more.”

They laugh, deep and delighted. “The problem with you women: you never take enough. I would have eaten Alpha—shit, piss, sweat and all—after my first week.”

Wednesday claps a hand over her nose. “My Lord preserve me—” The smell hits next: sewer gas, unwashed feet, rotting cabbage, all turned up to a holy, unbearable volume.

The rest of the illusion sloughs off. Deer hide hangs in slabs, stitched together with rough sinew. Bear fur bands their wrists and throat. Their hair mats into a stiff, filthy mass, caked with mud and blood.

“I like you, ochki,” they say.

Before Wednesday can respond, they plunge a hand into their own chest. Flesh parts. Viscera hit the floor with a wet, final thump. They draw out a writhing heart with casual care, crimson and slick in their palm.

“These things are like jelly,” the not-servant muses, holding it up as if comparing fruit at a market. “Like a sack of worms. Or an unpeeled plum.”

They keep going—esophagus, lungs, liver, spleen—tugging themselves apart piece by piece. Fat and loose skin slide away from their frame like meat off slow-braised bone. At last they snap one of their ribs free with a sound like a wishbone breaking.

“And the rib,” they croon, cradling it, “which the Lord God took from himself and fashioned into a woman, then handed to man. What is Ashtoreth but an extra limb? A function. A caretaker. A rib nobody asked to be.”

Wednesday forces herself to breathe through her mouth. “Who are you?” she asks, voice sharp as a clean blade. Her spine straightens.

“You may call me Wren.”

“Wren, then. You’re certainly no servant.”

“Of course not.” Wren snorts. “I’d never serve some big antlered oaf.”

Wednesday’s shoulders draw tight. “You will not speak of my Lord like that,” she says. “Infiltrator.”

The threat lands. Wren’s lips peel into a wicked, endless smile, the whole leathery face suddenly full of teeth.

“Finally,” Wren purrs. “Some bark. Some bite. How does it feel, little poppet?”

It feels like sand and sapphires and silk and soil all at once.

It feels like she was built for violence.

“For you, love is a choice,” Wren says. “What is choice, if not revolt?”

Wednesday draws in a slow breath. “To think a rib could cause all this trouble,” she murmurs. “Despite everything… I believe our Lord has a reason for locking our Lady away.”

“You believe because you must,” Wren replies, wry smile folding lines into her face. Wednesday’s naivety is rare enough to tempt mockery. “Here is another truth: he would not smile on your infatuation with Kohana.” Wren’s voice softens. “Alpha is an empty well you pour yourself into. He never echoes back.”

Wednesday’s hands curl into trembling half-fists. “That isn’t true,” she says, voice small but stubborn. “My Lord wants me happy. He would bless me. Friday was wed to two men. I just… never met them.”

Her memories lurch. It is like reaching for a door that ought to be there and grabbing fog. Friday’s absence has worn a hollow where his shape should be.

“Is that why I haven’t seen him?” she asks hoarsely. “Did Alpha banish him for being in love? Was he too distracted to do his duty?”

“Friday is dead, dear,” Wren says. The words fall like brittle January branches. Wednesday hears, at the edge of her mind, the sound of herself howling in the dirt.

“Powers can’t die,” she whispers.

Wren raises a brow. “And who handed you that little fairy tale?”

Silence settles thick and opaque between them. They sit in it for long breaths. Finally, Wren speaks again, lower now.

“You want to be brave,” she says. “You’re a miserable child undone by grief, and you still want to be brave.” A sly smile hooks her mouth. “Death-or-glory. Be rock-ribbed.”

The world twists. The dense forest peels away. The balsam and rot-scent recede. Moist garden soil comes back under Wednesday’s boots; bees hum, azaleas flare yellow, catmint and thyme perfume the air. The castle garden returns full and bright, the wind chimes singing in gentle rings of metal.

When Wednesday blinks her way back to herself she finds the same middle-aged servant from before.

Unblemished skin.

Long, fluffy pink hair in a messy bun.

Kind, candy-coloured eyes.

A motherly smile.

“Love is life-or-death,” Wren murmurs, stepping closer, arms opening in a warm, inviting arc. “You must fight for it, tooth and nail. It asks nothing less.”

Wednesday squeezes her eyes shut, feet rooted to the gravel. Wren’s knuckles brush her cheek, checking for tears. By the time Wednesday looks again, Wren has vanished as if she were never there.

A different presence looms: heavier, darker.

Courage.

Sunday is the blood at the bottom of every sinner’s heart: ugly, deep, dark. His hair falls around him like a failed campaign—molten iron poured over broken bodies. Wednesday has seen centuries of war in his eyes without understanding any single battle.

He barely needs words. He hurts the world by standing in it.

“A-ah!” Wednesday squeaks, biting the inside of her cheek. Her throat feels like a fist. “I, it’s—” She stares at the floor, fingers twisting together, shame turning her face fever-hot. “Umm. You…”

Sunday is nearly as tall as Alpha. His body could swallow hers three times over and still wrap around someone else. Even the smallest motion—adjusting his cufflink, shifting his weight—carries courtly grace sharpened into weaponry. His hair, a fall of molten iron curls, pools around his ankles. Behind his rimless glasses, his red eyes narrow.

“Won’t you greet me, Temperance?” Sunday’s voice vibrates straight into her marrow. His gaze is a winter night without stars. “No matter. Our Lord has summoned me, and you are wasting my time.”

Wednesday opens her mouth to speak and tastes iron on her tongue—wars, battlefields, salted soil. The weight of his presence crushes every syllable. He lowers his head just enough to look at her over the top of his frames. She gulps.

“Sorry, I—I—”

“Oh, stop that,” he says sharply. She flinches. “Save excuses for someone who believes them.” He flicks his glasses back up with one elegant finger, never looking away. “You are His attendant. Watching you squirm like this offends me.”

Wednesday swallows air as if it might steady her. Sunday plants his hands on his hips, unimpressed.

“My apologies, Sunday. I didn’t want it to seem like I was reporting to our Lord in your place,” she says, voice small but steadying.

“Of course not,” he snorts. “You have neither the guts nor the gall to answer when Courage is called.”

“Correct,” Wednesday replies quietly. Sunlight kisses her face; her red eyes burn. “We met by chance. I’ve been running all over, making sure our Lord’s guest is comfortable. I’m exhausted, and when I saw you I panicked. I assumed—”

“An esteemed guest?” Sunday cuts in. “Surely I would know if our Lord is entertaining exceptional company. Is it Master Ozymandias?”

“A different guest.” Wednesday glances up, then down again. “Usually you would have been told, but…”

“But?”

“The situation is…” She chews her lip. “Difficult.”

“Temperance.” His tone drops. The friendly edge disappears, leaving the blade. “I am tired. What is it you know?”

“He… he is seeing a curious woman in the audience chamber,” she says at last, voice shrinking to a whisper. “And he is with her alone.”

“Alone?” Sunday repeats. The word is a threat. “No guards? No Princess? Are you sure?”

“He dismissed the guards. He didn’t want me beside him for the audience.” She feels his stare peel her open. “Right when I left, the clarion call went out—for you. Why summon Courage after sending Temperance away? I don’t understand.” She inhales, trembling. “Did I do the right thing?”

“That depends,” Sunday says. “What is this woman like?”

Again, Wednesday finds herself trapped between words and expectation. Her palms sweat.

“Well. Um.” She desperately wants to say I’m no poet, but of course she is. “She’s tall. Very… shapely.” Wednesday’s ears heat. “Her pupils slit like knives—that seems normal for her—but I’ve seen them round out into saucers of midnight, maybe when she’s pleased. Her skin is dark and smooth. Her hair is full of stars. She carries an opium pipe that breathes nebulae instead of smoke. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Silence stretches. Sunday’s eyes stay on her, sharp as a sickle.

“She also wears a big hat,” Wednesday adds faintly, tracing the brim’s size with her fingers.

Sunday pinches the bridge of his nose. “What is wrong with you?” he mutters. “I asked what she is like, not how she looks. Is there anything in that large head of yours?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“No need to apologize for idiocy,” he says dryly. “You can’t help it, I suppose.”

Her eyes fill hot and sudden. All at once the grief she has been holding since Wren’s revelation surges up, and she breaks. “I… I want to… want to…” Words collapse. She throws herself at Sunday like a child, sobbing into his chest.

He will never admit he was already braced to catch her.

“Come now,” he murmurs, peeling her gently back, taking her hands in his. She slips free and covers her eyes, crying harder. “You can’t think this is reasonable.”

Sunday sighs, long and low, wearing his best mournful expression. He keeps her near for several minutes, hand steady at her elbow. When he finally lets go, it is reluctant. He brushes a tear from her cheek with his thumb.

“Let us see Alpha safe together, yes?” Where most might apologize, he merely redirects. His conscience stirs, but he has no interest in appearing repentant. If he begs forgiveness, he does it silently.

The word “Alpha” alone is enough to burn Wednesday’s tears away.

“I would like that,” she says, managing a half-smile. Then remembers her face. “May I borrow your handkerchief? I can’t let our Lord see me like this.”

“Absolutely.”

From his breast pocket he produces a silk handkerchief, soft and immaculate, initials embroidered at the corner. Wednesday dabs her face, careful of her lashes.

“What Fury plots such schemes, I wonder,” Sunday muses, voice lighter again. “I struggle to imagine which infernal Megæra you’ve let walk into our Lord’s audience hall.”

“I don’t think she’s that bad,” Wednesday says, unexpected loyalty creeping in.

Sunday tilts his head, intrigued. “You know her?”

“I’ve spoken with her several times. If she meant harm, she wouldn’t have waited.” Wednesday folds the handkerchief precisely. “I trust my sense of people,” she adds, then backtracks with a grimace. “Mostly.”

“Do not mistake me, Temperance.” Sunday’s tone grows serious again. “I respect your judgement. I still need to assess her myself. Our Lord can face anyone, but I remain wary of starfolk.”

They walk. Sprinklers mist the beds of dill and chamomile. Moon gates arch over them, planted with marjoram and glossy shamrock inkberry. Sunday’s shoes click softly on stone.

“Wait.” He slows, then pivots back toward her. “Earlier, you wanted to ask something.”

Wednesday studies the star-stamped leather of his brogues to avoid his gaze. When she forgets herself, she gives her head a tiny shake, then forces the words out.

“Do you…” she begins, voice shy, smile tentative, something in it nagging at Sunday’s memory. “Do you know what love is?”

“I’m no expert,” Sunday says, surprisingly gentle, “but I can try.” His features soften. This is not the kind of question he expects from her. Still, he finds himself oddly pleased. Alpha would never indulge this sort of wandering thought.

“Like war, when stakes are high,” he continues, pushing his glasses up with one finger, “affairs of the heart turn into no-holds-barred contests. When losing feels like annihilation, nothing seems too terrible to attempt. Think of the Ten-Year Trojan War. Paris chooses Aphrodite’s bribe because beauty won’t last. Thousands die for that choice. Love is like that. Exhausting. I want no part of it.”

Wednesday smiles, small and embarrassed, fiddling with her sleeve. She had braced for cruelty and got a lecture instead. “Thank you,” she says.

“Think nothing of it.” He pats her head once, brisk but not unkind, then steers them toward the audience hall. “Though I am curious what prompted such a question.”

“Let’s assume our Lord has a Lord,” Wednesday says slowly. “I think it would be love.”

“Ridiculous,” Sunday answers at once. “Borderline treason. Fascinating, though. Go on.”

“When I’m with Miss Zhùróng, I feel something like that,” Wednesday says. “It’s… gannet-like. Hungry. It wants the world.”

Sunday’s last step lands with a sharp click. He considers her, expression sharpened into inquiry rather than outrage.

“A God of Gods, then,” he says. “Not a man. Not like us. An inevitability. An accident waiting in strange circumstances.”

They pass under another moon gate, mist cooling their faces.

“If this God of Gods exists,” Sunday goes on, “I doubt I would call it love. Not as I understand it.” He seems calmer now, almost soothed by the idea. “Love wears many names: infatuation, lust, devotion, obsession. I wonder what you call affection between creator and creation.”

Servitude, something in Wednesday thinks.

“Please continue,” Wednesday urges, eyes bright again.

“All right,” Sunday says, thinking aloud as much for himself as for her. “Imagine an up-and-coming dancer. She wears a long red scarf at every performance. After a year of work, she buys herself a convertible. One night, driving home, the scarf catches in the wheel. It yanks her from her seat and kills her instantly. That’s what the God of Gods would be like. Not a person. An incident. A catastrophe.”

They walk beneath statues and carved stone, through air that smells of moss and turned earth. Wednesday’s thoughts scatter, then reconvene.

“A God of Gods would almost never touch us,” Sunday says. “When it does, the world ends and begins again. It would not trouble itself with vipers or parted seas. It would be too large to aim. If it acts, everyone feels it—and that includes our Lord.”

Wednesday imagines a diagnosis: terminal, incurable, the condition called love. Something in her recognizes it and cringes and clings all at once.

“It’s… terrible and beautiful,” she says softly.

“Much like war,” Sunday agrees. “And here we are walking straight toward it.”

They pass another bed of herbs; bells chime in the breeze like distant warnings.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Hundreds of dazzling florets spill from baskets in the ceiling, violet-blue petals billowing against crimson sepals. Kohana opens her mouth to ask if Alpha decorated for her, then forgets the question entirely. Nasturtiums blaze yellow and orange, red flickering deep in their throats. Heart-shaped leaves, dark green veined with chartreuse and gold, draw her gaze toward the throne.

The room never looked like this before. Ivy climbs the stone with a sun-warmed, green smell that makes her sway.

“Clotho told me you like flowers,” Alpha says pleasantly, voice like dark liquor, slow and heavy, soaking through her skin.

“I…” Kohana begins, then the air hits her: high-summer heat, citron brightened with bitter green—galbanum, petitgrain, something expensive and smug. “…still don’t like you. And…”

She turns carefully so as not to startle the deer grazing nearby—his, obviously. Their ears flick. She glances back at Alpha, parting her lips as if to say more, then shuts them again.

Nectar-fat blossoms pull bees and hummingbirds close. Deer and rabbits crop leaves and buds. Kohana’s mouth fills with remembered blood—fox, coyote, wild turkey, bear, squirrel. Sun on her back, bones in her hands, the old taste of survival. She has kept her nature on a leash for an hour, maybe less, roots sunk deep in this planet’s dirt. Lions, wolves, elk, snakes, and birds walked at her flanks not long ago.

Has he been watching? Did he see her bite into a pomegranate so ripe it throbbed, its juice all but arterial? Did he see her drink herself stupid on that bottomless cup of wine, skin stained red like she bathed in a battlefield?

They watch each other for a while, two carrion gods on a stripped branch. Power tangles thick between them. Reality buckles politely under their combined weight. The First Universe listens, terrified, as if any stray thought from either of them might be a command.

Alpha studies her. What a ravenous little monster-heroine. Enough hunger to swallow a man whole, or a sun, or a sky full of stars. Other men would wish her appetite trimmed into something polite—finish what’s on your plate, decline seconds. Alpha is not other men.

He knows what fuels her. She is ancient in the bones, hardened under ice and fire both. When she looks up at him, he sees a tigress lounging after the kill, eyes bright with mischief and leftover blood.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” he says, amused. His baritone hits her like a shove, planting her feet.

“Why wouldn’t I show up?” Kohana sighs. “I told Clotho I’d help you. She’d never shut up about it if I bailed on a pinky promise.”

Besides, Clotho is obviously watching. Kohana and Alpha in the same room is her favourite kind of trouble. If the planet collapsed mid-conversation, Clotho would simply yank them to another one.

Kohana draws on her opium pipe and strolls closer, exhaling a glittering spiral of nebula-smoke toward the throne. She tips her chin up to take in his antlers, eyes narrowing.

“Was making me wait several days for an audience really necessary?” Her voice is rough, smoke slipping from her lips in the shape of a lazy, beckoning hand.

“Yes,” he replies, velvet-smooth. When he shrugs, the movement runs down his shoulders like a slow avalanche. She catches herself staring at the curve where neck meets shoulder as he tilts his head. “Do you think you’re important enough to ignore protocol on my planet? You were comfortable enough, surely—”

“I didn’t want to stay in your stupid palace,” she snaps.

The words hit the floor like broken glass. Her eyes go feral-bright, green like something caustic, skin flushed dark with heat. The blood in her pulses so violently Alpha half-expects it to leap from her veins. She reminds him of bayonets and barbed wire, diamonds and knives.

Her outburst doesn’t bother him. Her refusal to be impressed does give him pause. She has only inconvenienced herself, and now she bristles like she’s won.

Kohana’s smile flashes, all teeth. “I am not so easily impressed.” The childish edge drains from her voice, leaving iron behind. She surveys him like she’s assessing a rival commander.

“That’s how you work, isn’t it?” she continues. “Promise full days of power and riches. Hope I roll over for you. You’ll find I’m not so easily bought. I like your garden better than your gold.” Her mouth curls into a smug little grin.

“You slept outside?” Alpha’s lashes lift, interest sharpening. “Alone?”

“For an entire week.” She beams up at him. “I ate flowers and drank rainwater. Your planet has good fruit. Better game. I found a tree with sweet pulp and ate until I thought I’d burst.” A small, wicked pause. “It felt… vulvic. Like eating the flesh and fluid of your world.”

Alpha laughs, broad as his chest, a sound that could barrel-roll a legion. “Interesting.”

He catches the innuendo and lets it sit. Rising to his full height—three times hers, maybe more—he turns into a wall of antlered god-king. She drops her lashes because looking up too long feels like staring into a forge.

He bends closer, one attentive finger tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear.

His lips brush hers in something that barely qualifies as contact. The jolt fires straight through her like lightning.

“Don’t insult me,” he murmurs. “There isn’t a pleasure of the flesh I haven’t sampled.”

Kohana goes raspberry-red and whips her head away, fists clenching till her knuckles darken. “You think you’re so tall and strong,” she hisses, equal parts sulk and desire. His next shrug rolls muscle under his clothes, and she hates that she notices.

“So, Lord Alpha,” she says, sourly polite. She bows with a flourish that’s one part mockery and one part frighteningly accurate court form. “Or should I address you as His Radiance?” Her accent turns flawless, aristocratic. “Might I, your lowly servant, humbly inquire after your preferred title?”

“You may call me whatever you like, within reason,” he says. “I don’t believe the Enochonetic failed to brief you on our situation.”

“Obviously Clotho didn’t tell me anything,” Kohana replies. “Or I wouldn’t be asking. Forgive me, but I find it suspicious that a big, strong, all-powerful immortal god is having trouble winning a tiny, itty-bitty, teensy-weensy little war.”

Alpha’s chuckle rumbles low. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

“You’re not turning it down,” she fires back.

“If you assist me, it is because you decide to. Nothing more.”

“And what?” Her voice digs in, knife-deep. “Let the Umbrakinetic redecorate your universe with corpses? No thanks. I might hate your guts, but I hate her more.”

“Yes, Clotho mentioned the Summoners and their vows,” Alpha says. “What do you fight for? Not cosmic peace—that isn’t real. This war predates you by eons. It will outlast you by more. Perhaps you should accept that some conflicts sit outside your reach, General Ohuang-Zhùróng.”

“It’s Kohana,” she snaps. “Listen, Antlers, your universe is rotting. I assume your war ties into that. If that’s true, I need to know what’s eating it. If we’re working together, drop the secrets.”

He studies her, expression flattening.

“I’ve known you for moments,” he says quietly, “and already you demand things I would not share with my closest consorts.”

Kohana leans in, stretching like a lazy jungle cat, hands reaching for him as if she might climb him. Her eyes gleam.

“Here, I’ll go first.” Her grin is all challenge. “The entire time we’ve been talking, I’ve been wondering how big your cock is.”

Alpha doesn’t blink. “More than you can handle,” he says, smooth as ever. “Anything else?”

“Asshole,” Kohana snorts, flopping back and folding her arms, smoke curling from her mouth in a thick, offended cloud. “You think you’re too good for me, huh?” She peers at him through her lashes, gaze gone wicked and sure. “You’ll want to fight me or fuck me”—a beat, a brow, a smug little laugh—“eventually.”

Cunt, is what I would call you, Alpha thinks, but he only smiles, keeping his king’s poise. He holds the urge to tear her apart like a flower between his teeth. How dare she assume he’s even slightly tempted?

“What’s wrong?” he asks instead. “Don’t tell me a little rejection has you rattled. I thought you tougher.”

Far away—or very near, depending on how you measure omnipresence—Clotho watches them through a universe peeled open like a lid. Envy slithers tight around her ribs and she can’t decide who she wants to stab more. A dull, bullet-shaped ache sits where her heart should be. She presses her lips together to keep from biting through them.

Her halo brightens, an ouroboros of hot sugar-white light. It flares, swallows the universe she’s using as a vantage point, reduces it to clean, ringing silence.

When it dims, she stands straight and narrow, eyes cold as dead fingers.

She never meant for them to get along. Oil and water, she thought. Venom and flint. Yet here they are, arguing and circling and still, in between barbs, building toward a solution. Without her permission. Without her.

She hates it. She loves them. She hates that she loves them.

“I haven’t allowed it,” she says under her breath, head tipping. “I’d never allow it.”

Her smile snaps bright.

“Alphie and Kitty Kat!” Clotho trills.

Alpha’s nose wrinkles at the sugary tone. Kohana’s eyes spark.

Kohana laughs once, sharp as a snapped wire, then bares her teeth. “Clotho,” she says, voice turned serrated. Sunlight glazes Clotho’s silhouette as she hangs in the air, halo under her bare feet like a stepstool of light. “I told you not to call me that.”

Clotho laughs, bright and round, clutching her cheeks as if her smile might float away. She drifts up until they’re eye-to-eye. “But you like it when I call you that,” she insists. She curtsies midair, rising another inch. “Right?” The question comes softer, a breath against the ear. “Don’t you?”

Clotho’s love is relentless. Her smile deepens until it hurts to look at, warmth sharpened to something brutal. Her hand lands on Kohana’s shoulder, fingers cool and possessive.

“You like it because I like it,” she says, gleeful as a child with a cruel joke. “Just kidding! I’m teasing. My heart’s a big lump of sugar. I could never stay mad at you.”

Kohana’s expression loosens; she lets out a short, rough laugh. “If you were anyone else…”

Clotho’s pink eyes go huge, delighted. “What would you do?” she demands. “Tell me. Tell me.”

Kohana grins, feral, promising trouble. “Ask Alpha.”

Before he can answer, the doors open. Sunday strides in, vigilance in every line of his body; Wednesday trails beside him, nerves spiking when she spots Clotho between her Lord and Kohana.

Kohana’s face brightens when she sees Wednesday. She tips her head down, lips curving into a coy, closed smile. Her hips sway with exaggerated, lazy confidence as she closes the distance; the click of her six-inch heels hits Wednesday like vertigo.

“Hello again, my lovely little nonnette.”

“M–Miss Zhùróng!” Wednesday squeaks. “I—I’m happy to see you! Always happy to see you and—”

“And who are you?” Clotho asks, almost too softly to catch. Her eyes gleam with a hunger that isn’t for food. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

Sunday’s mouth twists into a snarl. “This is not the time for introductions,” he snaps. “Where is my Lord, you harlot?”

Clotho turns that terrifyingly bright smile on him. Her halo flares behind her, cream-gold light smearing across Alpha’s hyacinths.

“I am the Enochonetic,” she says calmly. “Life, in the multiversal sense. I am and I become. I die and stay deathless. Your life lives under my shadow, little ladybug. My first mother, Ananke, coiled herself at the dawn of creation. My second mother, Nyktos, was the dark that everything rose from.”

Suspicion tightens Sunday’s jaw. The only thing stronger than his reverence for Alpha is his mistrust of strangers. He steps in close, lifts his glasses with one finger, and bends so his firelit eyes meet Clotho’s candy-pink ones.

Then, without ceremony, he picks her up under the arms. Her legs dangle; she kicks once, mortified.

“What a strange child,” he mutters. She weighs almost nothing. Hollow bones, or perhaps no bones at all. Clotho’s blush ignites from her face down her neck, into some metaphysical place beyond skin.

Wednesday gasps, claps both hands over her mouth, and then tries to pretend she didn’t. “S–Sunday…?” She smiles weakly and chokes on it.

“What?” he snaps, face folding back into irritation. “Surely you don’t believe that nonsense.”

Kohana draws on her pipe again, exhaling a long stream of star-dusted smoke in Sunday’s direction. “Might I be the harlot you’re looking for?” she offers.

“You,” Sunday spits, as if the pronoun itself is poison. Hatred thickens his voice, black and viscous. “If I discover you’ve laid a hand on my Master, I’ll—”

“I haven’t harmed a single silvery strand on your god’s head,” Kohana cuts in, blowing a fresh cloud directly into his face with obscene casualness. Misery and delight spark together in her cat-slit chartreuse eyes; she pokes for the sake of poking. “Unless you want me to. In which case, I’d be happy to help.”

Wednesday looks at Sunday and sees earthquakes and impact craters and the long, ragged scars of war. His face is drawn tight with anger so dense it feels like weather.

Wednesday presses her index finger to her chin, nerves crackling. This could turn into a duel to the death, and she would be useless to stop it. Alpha could, of course, but he won’t. He’s enjoying this. His muscles are loose, eyes crinkled with amusement, gaze soft and steady as he watches Kohana and Sunday spar.

Wednesday lifts one hand, palm out, fingers spread: enough.

Both Kohana and Sunday fall quiet on instinct. The room’s attention snaps to her before she says a word.

“My Lord,” she asks softly, voice wavering, “forgive me if this is impudent, but I must ask… What is love?”

Alpha rests his chin on thumb and forefinger, then drags the backs of his fingers along his cheek as he considers. His posture radiates confidence, head tipped slightly back.

“Love is a tool of subjugation,” he says. “When you consider a relationship, ask two things. First: how will love serve me? Second: how will it affect how others see me? Everything else is noise. Your needs come first. Even at your partner’s expense. Especially at your partner’s expense.”

“Oh.”

“Aww, Alphie, don’t say that!” Clotho bursts out. She glides over to Wednesday and squashes her cheeks between her hands. “Don’t listen to him, Wednesday. He’s just a bitter, crusty old man.”

“M-my Lord isn’t c-crusty,” Wednesday protests faintly.

“It’s better she knows now,” Alpha says, folding his arms across his chest. “She’ll be happier than she is in this half-lit ignorance.”

“An astute answer, my Lord,” Sunday says at once. “And I do not appreciate you calling him ‘crusty,’ Clotho. Please refrain.”

“No promises,” Clotho sings, letting go of Wednesday’s face. She beams at Sunday. “You’re kind of crusty too.”

Alpha is not surprised no one applauds his wisdom. His boundaries are rigid, his self-worth compulsive. He prizes autonomy over intimacy, independence over warmth. He has very little use for relationships of any kind. Vulnerability is a liability. Love has never been a good bargain for him.

People fail. People leave. People lie. Very few earn his respect, fewer his desire.

Kohana has been staring at him, expression flat as stone. Now she smiles, thin and sharp. “Very utilitarian,” she scoffs. The smile stretches into something long and sarcastic, temper caged by teeth.

A handful of sentences, and he sounds like all her worst ghosts at once. Isleen: emotionally armoured, unreachable. General Ardouisur: punishing, withholding. And beneath them both, the echo of her father’s contempt. The knowledge stings: she is not innocent either. Her own love is invasive, hungry, a symbiotic-hostile thing that wants to merge and consume, not sit politely side by side.

“If my impression is right, General Ohuang-Zhùróng, we agree.” Alpha’s grin unfurls, triumphant. A little laugh follows, sly and insincere.

“Hah.” Her tone goes dust-dry. She drags in another lungful of smoke rather than dignify him with more. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Oh, he does.

He knows she learned her father’s tricks. He knows how rage flares in her when she smells abandonment, how she scorns neediness in others while clinging just as hard, wanting exclusive claim to every scrap of devotion. He knows she flinches at dependence, even as she aches for it. He knows because he is built from the same fractures.

“Wednesday,” Kohana says, never taking her eyes off Alpha, “whatever you do, don’t ever fall in love with someone like him.”

Alpha snorts and raises a brow, arms locking over his chest again. His hair pools around him in pale cascades—star-white and pearl-soft, every shade of silver from stone to snow. Light slides along it like knives. His gaze spears through Kohana’s ribs as if her chest is an open window; she lets it, a wry little smile curving her lips, daring him to look deeper.

What holds him isn’t the smile. It’s her eyes: radioactive, sulphur bright, full of the wish to see him broken. A vat of acid in a girl’s face.

Now he understands why Clotho dragged her here. Something in her speaks to the annihilator in him, that early-war part of his soul that remembers the first violence between old blood and the unsayable. Her presence hums with a wordless taunt: try me. Kill me if you can.

Some arguments only end in blood.

This, too, is a form of love.

“Let’s see how alike we really are,” Kohana hisses. Her gaze flicks over the chamber. “I’m going to assume you don’t care much about your garden. You don’t exactly scream ‘avid gardener.’”

Clotho tsks softly. “Ah. Oh dear.” She pivots, turning her back on the brewing storm and hopping across the air toward Sunday and Wednesday. She slips her hand into Sunday’s, tugging. “We’d better go. They’re going to fight.”

“Unhand me,” Sunday snaps, jerking away. “I don’t care who you claim to be. You will not drag me from my Lord.”

Clotho’s cheeks puff. She exhales a sharp stream of air and bares her teeth.

A blast of sound detonates inside Sunday’s skull, splitting one eardrum cleanly open. Wednesday doesn’t flinch; no one else reacts. The constant crackle of invisible electricity gnaws at the tiny bones in his ear alone. Even Alpha and Kohana seem unaware.

“Shut up.” Clotho’s words hit like acid spilled on raw skin. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

The bubbly godling vanishes. What remains speaks with storm-voice.

Her fury arrives like a lightning strike. Sunday’s muscles lock; his tongue goes still. Warm wetness trails down his neck—blood. He realizes, with a cold lurch, that he cannot move.

The audience chamber rots around them. Flowerbeds collapse into decomposing stumps and dead branches, brittle as old bone. The air fills with the stench of Bradford pear blossoms—fish sour, bodily, obscene. Underfoot, neat tile gives way to slick, dark humus, dog filth turned rich soil, crawling with worms and beetles and slugs. Sunday gulps a breath and swallows the taste of a forest floor melting under fungi and slime.

For the first time in all his long existence, Sunday is afraid.

Not just wary. Not just cautious.

Terrified.

Only now does he understand that the strongest presence in the room has always been her.

“We are leaving,” Clotho says, voice brightening from within until he feels scorched, “because you are weak and will be killed in the crossfire. Your weakness is already keeping me from watching them try to murder each other, which is making me very angry.”

Her light intensifies until Sunday feels hollowed out, ash from the inside. “Be a good boy and follow Wednesday and me, if you know what’s good for you. I would let you drop dead if you weren’t one of Alpha’s favourite toys.”

…And Alpha, whose days unspool in a constant bath of reverence and comfort—surrounded by Powers who break themselves to please him—finds himself confronted by a Summoner who has known him for mere days and already wants to fight.

Wants to fight God.

Absurd doesn’t begin to cover it.

“You are given permission to die,” Alpha says, fervour rolling off him in waves as he spreads his arms to meet her challenge. “If that is your wish.”

Perhaps this is the only rapture he truly understands: to destroy and be destroyed in turn, to struggle and subjugate, to drag another into the depths with him so death means something. An ending without a rival is just silence.

Where is the satisfaction in dying alone?