Wednesday, with her hair pulled into two messy, knee-length pigtails, and her thickly-framed circular glasses bouncing up and down the bridge of her nose, skips down a corridor in Alpha’s castle, her hands entwined behind her back and her face alight with an ear-to-ear smile. Her dark skin drinks the warm glow of the afternoon sun spilling through cedarwood lattice windows adorned with wild vines and flowers. Kohana, with a sure hand, and a steady eye, quivered keen at Wednesday’s chest, and where the arrows of others would glance away from her breast, Kohana’s weapons made their silent conquest.

So this is love, cake-sweet and candy-sticky, warm like milk jelly and amber-honey; so this is love, to eat and be eaten, to be swallowed up, swallowed whole, the mashing of skin and sinew and marrow, the sucking of the bone.

“My chest feels like it will explode.” It is her heart, a girl-heart where a beast’s heart should be, a whining, pining little thing full of want and unbearable longing. “What I wouldn’t give to see Miss Zhùróng again.”

At the behest of Wednesday’s fingertips comes a fairy-tale mirror figured in gold chrome with a gloss varnish finish. Free from the shackles of the Eye of the Universe, she’s able to use her Vitrikinesis whensoever she pleases. Wednesday tears a tiny hole in the 4th dimensional space connecting their two non-adjacent locations, so eager she is to touch her face, to return to Alpha’s throne room and throw herself at the Summoner’s feet, hoarding her attention like gold.

Wednesday smiles under her hand, watching Kohana and Alpha converse through the glass, a secret, selfish thing, stifling a giggle.

“It is unlike me to spy, but full glad I am to have this one thing,” Wednesday concludes after musing for some time. “Is it so bad, to steal away another look, another glance…?”

With her hands clasped gently against her chest–and her eyes glued on the mirror–she saunters forward. Her gait is businesslike and brisk despite intruding on her Master’s privacy; all the world is Wednesday’s want, her desire dampening down, stamping out, so great that there is room for little else, stabbing and squeezing and pulling her caution apart.

“Miss Zhùróng would simply take what she wants without thinking better of it. I shall adopt her style.” Wednesday imagines herself some ravenous dragon, a large beast swelling up with hell and inferno. A retainer stands witness to Wednesday’s attempt to make herself seem more intimidating; they think she looks more akin to a bird puffing up to look more menacing to an aggressive threat, or like a small dog raising its hackles to appear bigger.

“Forgive me for asking, Temperance, but are you well?” the servant asks, reaching out a hand, looking at Wednesday as if she has gone mad.

“Eep!” Wednesday’s face is consumed with an ascending heart-fire, setting aflame her nose, her forehead, the apples of her cheeks. She slams her eyes shut. Her lips tremble. “W-wah, d-don’t startle me like that! I’m fine, I’m fine,” Wednesday stammers in an attempt to steel herself, to calm her nerves gone haywire, “I swear it! Don’t tell Our Lord, don’t tell Alpha!”

She tries to choke back Alpha’s name, but it is far too late to take back her impudence. His name thrashes on its way down her throat, shrapnel-sharp and barbed-wire bitter. Her body stiffens, as if to run, but she only manages to look down in shame, her mouth snapping shut like the mandibles of a Dracula ant.

“I won’t, I assure you,” the servant says with a pitying smile, startled into the comforting,  parental politesse of a psychiatrist. “I have not heard you say one thing,” they add quietly, their curiosity mounting after a moment’s pause. “Are you in love?” It’s more frank than the servant intended, and so they follow the question with a tittering laugh as to soften the blow of their audacious question.

“I-I’m not sure,” Wednesday answers with a furious blush, immediately turning her back to the servant after, “I don’t think Powers are meant to know such feelings.”

“Were you not created of Our Lord’s flesh and bone?” Their question is given in soft, gentle tones. Wednesday reflects upon their words and receives them with a nod and a smile.

“Love is an impulse. It does not wait for permission.” The nameless servant turns their attention to a broadleaf maple tree furrowed with reddish-brown bark. The cuts they make with their lopping shears are precise and decisive; sap seeps from the tree’s wounds, rivulets of honey–though unsightly–running down its bark like thick ichor. “Love will lose faith, it will lose trust, even hope. It wants to endure, be a bashful, blushing thing, but it is hungry and has an appetite for everything. It demands. It yearns.”

Love leaves neither man nor beast undevoured.

Love is all-consuming, all-pervasive, all-encompassing.

Love spares no quarter. Love leaves no survivors. Love takes no prisoners.

My ache is immeasurably deep. My myriad throats are full of rotting corpses. My four-chamber belly is agape-open, thrown wide and spread far, a yawning, endless rapture. I eat coronae and cough up chorales. I eat starlight and retch sacred text. I am weary and wanting and waiting. I feel God in the points of my cataclysm-whetted teeth, and my angel wing tongue lays thick in my mouth, pink as deer meat.

“You know so much about love. It’s… amazing,” Wednesday says with awed, breathy belief.

“If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” The servant smiles so slightly that Wednesday almost does not catch it. They speak softly, and with much grace. “It may surprise you, to know that in the history of the multiverse, from the sun to the waxing moon, no one has done a thing that was not done for love. I will tell you a secret: even Our Lord has been besieged by love.”

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

“Our Lady? Bah.” The servant’s tone is as dry as sun-bleached Sahara bone. Wednesday flinches at the sneer in their voice. She feels small, childish, and touches her red fringe with a nervous hand. “Does the woman not deserve the dignity of her name? Poor Ashtoreth.”

“Y-yes, but…” Wednesday is trembling now, searching for the words to best convey her thoughts. “It’s… ah…. Uncouth to refer to our Sovereigns by their names.”

Wren barks a rough laugh: gritty, dirty, abrasive like sandpaper, dark brown flakes of rust. “You are right, in your own ignorant way. Indeed Ashtoreth has been faithful to Alpha. She was made for him, locked away in that dimensional tower.”

“I beg your pardon?” Wednesday replies, her voice a high-pitched squeak strangled tight with two hands.

This conversation is no longer appropriate. She should not be talking about the relationship between her god and his chosen companion, and if this servant were half as mindful as she is they would take this opportunity to switch the topic of discussion. Pressing her lips together, Wednesday clasps and unclasps her hands to convey her discomfort through gesture.

“Must I recount the maiden-in-a-tower story to you even though you’ve heard it a thousand times?” the servant snaps. Their words feel like a knife thrusted up through Wednesday’s chin, piercing past the cartilage of her nose and plunging into the squishy brain matter of her skull. “The Adam-Eve story is as old as I am. Perhaps it is a myth. Perhaps it is a tale. Know this: it is both true and untrue, a eulogium to life and death.”

“But you don’t look so old–”

“It is human nature for your kind to,” the servant says, nonchalantly waving their hand around, “marry up things. You make men and women contractual, in the same way you do life and death.”

Wednesday blinks, thoroughly confused. Alpha is not just her god, but the god of all. Both she and this servant live on a planet He created. She doesn’t understand why they keep using categorical language, as if they are not of this world, as if they aren’t of the Nulleq, and the more Wednesday attempts to parse the servant’s strange behavior the less she understands.

“But I don’t think about any of those things–”

Wednesday protests, but the servant puts their hands on their hips in annoyance. “Tuh! Your god should have given you some backbone. Better find it quick, girl.”

Wednesday suddenly becomes hyper aware of the shadows in the room, darkness clutching at her from the corners. Several high-pitched noises ring in her ears: the shrill staccato of katydids, the buzzing of crickets and cicadas, the ceaseless humming of mosquitos on the hunt. Her heart starts beating with the cadence of a war drum, her skin prickling in gooseflesh, the little hairs on the back of her neck standing erect. Physically she is in Alpha’s castle, but mentally she’s found herself in a forest so dense with fir and pine trees that sunlight barely pierces through them. She can smell the balsam sap, taste the sharp, resiny green flavor.

That this is some sort of magic, there can be no doubt, but Wednesday has never experienced anything like this.

The tightening in her chest is intense. Her lungs’ hunger for air is excruciating. She takes very fast, shallow breaths to regulate her breathing but she can’t quite get enough oxygen to sate her organs.

“Iamnotagirl.” It all comes out in one word.

“Hah! No? A boy then, like me? Maybe a mongrel?”

Tendrils of soot black darkness snapping around the servant’s body reveal thickened, tough, weather-beaten brown skin dappled in skin tags and liver spots.

Heavy, dark brows sit atop rheumy, red-rimmed eyes sporting two different colours, milky white and cinnamon (a cataract, perhaps)?

“I jest. You are centuries old, this I know. But! That makes it no better. You see? That’s the problem with you women. You never want more.” A pause. A hearty, belly-slapping laugh. “I would have eaten Alpha–shit, piss, sweat and all–after my first week on the job.” Behind scabby, cracked lips are teeth blackened by what Wednesday can only imagine is decades of neglect, several of them missing.

“My Lord preserve me–” she gasps, clamping a hand over her nose. The odor of sewer gas, unwashed feet and rotting cabbage assaults Wednesday’s nostrils and she almost keels over from the intensity of it, no doubt emanating from the person before her.

Another brave glance at the servant reveals their attire: large slabs of deer hide held together by string weaved from the tough, fibrous tissues of various animals. The fur wrapped around their neck, wrists and ankles is undoubtedly that of a bears’, coarse and close-packed. The hair on the servant’s head is a stiff, prominent and impenetrable mass of mats saturated with mud and cruor.

“I like you, ochki.” They plunge their hand into their chest, tearing out a fistful of viscera; their innards hit the floor with a gushy, wet thump, burgundy-red pulp splattering against the earth. Slipping their hand deftly beneath their ribs, they yank out their writhing, squirming heart in one quick surgical motion. “These things are like jelly,” the servant says casually, as if holding their own heart is as normal as taking in air. “Feels like holding a bag of juicy, slimy earthworms. Or an unpeeled fruit.”

The servant continues to empty themselves–esophagus, lungs, liver, spleen–ripping and tearing and snatching. Fat and sagging skin slip away from their body like meat falling off a braised rack of barbeque pork.

The siege on themselves ends when they snap away one of their ribs like pulling apart a wishbone.

“And the rib,” they begin, swooning over their hard-sought prize, “which the Lord God had taken from himself, made He a woman, and brought her unto man. What is Ashtoreth, but another extension of Alpha! Being created to care for someone is more of a function than love, da?”

“Who are you?” Wednesday asks, her voice as keen as a knife’s edge. She straightens.

“You may call me Wren.”

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

Wren laughs, harsh and hoarse. “Of course not. I’d never serve some big antlered oaf.”

Wednesday’s shoulders grind against her spine. “You will not speak of my Lord in that manner, infiltrator.” It is a threat. It is also a promise. Wednesday’s eyes have been whetted into blades that cut Wren’s throat from Adam’s apple to nape, flaying flesh and skewering vertebrae.

Wren’s lips curl into a wicked smile, long and seemingly endless, widening her wrinkled, leathery face. “Finally, some bark. Some bite! How does it feel, little poppet?”

How does it feel? Like sand. Like sapphires. Like silk and soil.

Like I was made for violence.

“For you, love is a choice. What is the ability to choose, if not revolt?”

“To think a rib could cause all this trouble,” Wednesday quietly answers after a brief bout of introspection, her voice relenting to softness. “Despite everything,” she swallows, her eyes bright with conviction, “I believe my Lord has a good reason for stowing Our Lady away.”

“You believe with all your tender, tiny bleeding heart that your god is just, because you must.”

Wren smiles wryly. Wednesday’s naivety is a rare sight in the multiverse; it’s difficult not to mock her. “I tell you this: he would not be amused with your infatuation with Kohana.” Wren’s voice is hushed, gentle. Poor Wednesday, sweet Wednesday, whose eyes turn bleary and dim. “Alpha is an empty well into which you pour yourself, and yet sounds no echo.”

Wednesday’s hands turn into loosely-wound fists, trembling with disbelief. She narrows her eyes at Wren, full of revulsion.

“That isn’t true,” she insists, her eyes glinting with depthless pleading. “My Lord would want me to be happy. He would give me his blessing. Friday is espoused to two lovely men, although I never,” her words catch like hooks in her throat at the realization, “I never… met them.”

Surely her memory fails her. Surely Friday’s nuptial ceremony happened so long ago she cannot recall attending it, or perhaps she has gotten so used to Friday’s absence so, too, has her memories of him vanished.

Wednesday draws a long breath, full of grief. She is not so loyal as to ignore the implications here. “Is that why I have seen hide nor hair of Friday? Was he banished because he was smitten? Too concerned with vain, empty, trifling things to do his duty as a Power?” She casts her eyes down, ashamed, afraid of Wren’s answer.

“Friday is dead, my dear.” Wren’s voice is hard, like January branches snapping under the weight of icicles. Although Wednesday says nothing she hears her own keening, mourning lament, sees her own unhindered display of grief, the way she howls sorrow into the ground down on both knees.

“Powers can’t die.” Wednesday is struck numb by her own mortality.

Wren raises a brow, folding her arms across her hollowed chest. “And who told you that?”

Silence is a thick, opaque fog that envelops both Crone and Temperance. They sit in it, an overlong period of remembrance and quiet reflection until, finally, Wren swallows thickly and speaks: “You want to be brave. You are a miserable child being undone by grief, and you want to be brave.”

There is something admirable in that bravery. A sly, all-knowing smile curls Wren’s lips. “Death-or-glory, I say. Be rock-ribbed.”

The area around the two begins to twist into normality again. The smell of moist, freshly turned soil comforts Wednesday. She is greeted by bees buzzing about the pristinely-trimmed butterfly-brushes and the creamy, crinkly-edged yellow blossoms of summer azaleas. Lured into the garden by catmint and thyme, the castle vibrates with the birdsong of orioles. A soothing breeze dances through deep tone wind chimes, bells of paradise and rings of Neptune. She can hear gravel crushed underfoot, grass rustling against each other in the light air. You are home, the violets whisper. You are home, and you are safe.

When Wednesday regains her bearings she looks for Wren, for that servant, and she is not disappointed when she sets her sights on the middle-aged person she had been talking to before all this started.

The same unblemished skin.

The same long, voluptuous pink hair tied back into a messy bun.

The same kind, thickly-lashed faery floss-coloured eyes.

The same sweet, motherly smile.

“Love is life-or-death,” Wren murmurs, and she holds both her arms wide in a gesture of warm, maternal love. “You must fight for it, tooth and nail. It demands no less.”

Wednesday shuts her eyes tight, her feet glued to the ground. Wren touches her cheeks with the back of her fingers–a placating gesture–and with her free hand she wipes at one of Wednesday’s eyes, expecting a shower of tears.

When Wednesday opens her eyes again Wren is gone, as if she were never there, and a familiar face looms over her. Courage.

Sunday is the blood at the bottom of every sinner’s heart: ugly, deep, dark. His hair, the colour of a battle in vain, bodies broken and bleeding and bestrewn.

His eyes. Wednesday cannot comprehend so much death happening at once. Alpha wrote Sunday’s existence in war, whereby he struggled in the womb of creation. The Power was annihilated, resurrected as a new man over and over again: a pathetic beginning, a crushing defeat that put iron in his backbone and sulfur in his blood in ad infinitum. Wednesday is not like Sunday–he was wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual, made to fail, to be desperate, to hit bottom by baring bone.

Sunday does not use words, he wastes away like Christ on the Cross, like stigmata in the hands, like bullet wounds through the heart. Wednesday learned long ago that he is a prince who acts like a beast, not altogether human or humane because he cannot afford to be a perfect gentleman. His heart is armed, barbed, a ticking time bomb to all except Lord Alpha.

“A-ah!” Wednesday squeaks, biting the inside of her cheek as terror gnaws on her heart. Her voice is high, her throat strangled tight with surprise. “I, it’s…” She glues her eyes to the ground, twisting her fingers together. Her face flushes with a deep, burning shame as she trembles under Sunday’s scouring gaze. “Umm… Y-you…” When she finally looks at him, she is overcome with terror.

He is a herculean slab of a man, eclipsing her in height, nearly as tall as the Lord they dutifully serve (Sunday’s body devours hers thrice over, but even the most minute of his movements are eloquent, genteel – he glides, he soars).

Sunday’s hair, a snarl of molten, crackling, fiery liquid iron poured fresh from a forge falling about his ankles in lustrous curls; his eyes, fringed with long lashes, slitted golden-red-orange and smoldering behind champagne-pink spectacles, peering down at Wednesday with a haughty stare of indifference. He raises one hand to adjust his cufflink with fastidious care.

“Won’t you greet me, Temperance?” Sunday’s voice shakes the marrow in her bones. His gaze, ice beneath ice. His face, an unforgiving February night. “I suppose it matters little,” comes his snappy addendum, his tone icicle sharp–he sounds like blizzard light, both hellfire and winter blight. Her throat has gone desert dry. “Our Lord has summoned me and you are wasting my time.”

Wednesday opens her mouth, scrambling to acknowledge the other Power but she is stopped by the meaty, metallic taste of a thousand wars on her tongue, eons of gore forced down her throat. She cannot bear the brutality of him, the crushing weight of his presence. He purses his lips and looks at Wednesday through the bottom of his glasses. She gulps. He pulls his cruel mouth into a snarl. Ashamed, she bows her head and blood surges in her ears, her face alight like fire. “Sorry, I-I–”

“Oh stop that,” he hisses. Wednesday sighs and sinks back. “I will have no excuses. Save that for someone else.” With an index finger he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose–an elegant, learned gesture–and continues to look down at Wednesday as he does so. Being in Sunday’s presence feels like she’s been thrust on the First War’s frontlines. “I know you have no stomach for it, and I cannot make a hero out of a coward, frightened to death as you always are, but really? You are His attendant. I find your constant squirming unbefitting of a Power.”

Wednesday calms her nerves by swallowing down a large gulp of air. Sunday purses his lips and plants his hands on his hips, furrowing his brows at her performance. “My apologies, Sunday. I did not want it to seem like I was reporting to our Lord in your stead.”

“Of course not. You would do no such thing. You have neither the guts nor the gall to answer when Courage is called,” he snorts.

“Correct,” Wednesday says peacefully. The sun takes her face into its hands and peppers her with kisses, turning hazel eyes into gold. “Our meeting is nothing more than a coincidence. I’ve been to and fro, you see, ensuring our Lord’s esteemed guest is pleased with their arrangements. I’ve been run ragged, and was nervous when I bumped into you, I assumed–”

“An esteemed guest? Surely I would have been made aware if our Lord was expecting company of the exceptional sort. Is it Master Ozymandias?”

Feeling a bit more confident, a faint smile curls her lips. “No. Usually you would have been told, but…”

“But?”

“The situation is…” Wednesday pauses, biting her lip. “Difficult.”

“Temperance,” Sunday hisses. His expression changes in an instant, from friendly and coaxing and open to furious and cruel and hard. “I tire of your babble. What is it that you know?”

“He, um–h-he is seeing a…” She trails off, eying him warily. “…C-curious woman in the audience chamber and…” Wednesday’s voice drops so that the chambermaid polishing the panes nearby cannot hear. “Alone.”

“Alone?” Sunday hisses, his voice selfsame low. He fights the urge to call her a liar. “What do you mean alone? Perhaps I did not hear you correctly. Are there no soldiers flanking his Majesty as we speak?” “And what of the Princess? Surely she would not leave her father in the company of a stranger from the stars.”

“He sent the guards away and did not want me by his side during the audience. I thought it strange, but who am I to question our Lord?” As she speaks, his eyes pry her apart. “And… And then I heard the clarion call to Courage, right as I made my exit. Why would our Lord summon you after sending me away? It makes little sense.” She breathes a shaky sigh of relief, relieved of this briefly-kept secret.

“Do you think I made the right decision?”

“That is contingent on a number of factors.”

“Such as…?”

“What was this mysterious woman like?”

Again Wednesday finds herself in this situation.

It’s hard not to be nervous; her increasing anxiety draws stress lines beneath her eyes and her heart beats thick against her chest. She presses her hands together, concealing palms slick with sweat. “Well… Um…” I’m no poet, she wants to say. She chokes those words back. “Our guest, she’s… Tall. Shapely, if I may be so bold as to describe her so. Her pupils slit into knives–their default state, it seems to me–but I have seen them become round saucers of midnight, perhaps linked to her emotions? Her skin is dark, complexion smooth, her hair dappled with the cosmos. She has with her the most curious opium pipe. It produces naught smoke, but nebulae. I have seen nothing like it.”

Sunday’s eyes–verglas and sharp sickle both–dwell freezing down on hers. In lieu of wallowing in the awkward silence Sunday has created, Wednesday settles into it. “She wears a big hat.” Temperance raises her arms, tracing the shape of the brim.

“What is wrong with you?” Sunday snorts at last, his reply running through her heart like a blade. “I asked what she is like, not how she looks. Is there anything in that large head of yours?”

“Ah…” Wednesday says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize for your idiocy. You can’t help it, I am sure.”

“I-I…” She flinches under the strength of Sunday’s frustration. Only in her grief is she equal to him. Temperance, ever a nervous, cobbled-together mess, begins to weep. “Want to… w-want to…” She abandons herself in Sunday’s arms, hot, round tears bursting forth from her eyes like a reservoir emptying itself through a failed dam. There is absolutely no chance Sunday will ever admit he was poised to catch her in an embrace, especially one this tender.

“Come now…” He murmurs, peeling her away, pressing her hands in his, but she suddenly disengages them and, folding her hands over her eyes, cries with an expression of despair. “You can’t think this is reasonable.”

Sunday sighs deep, wearing his best mournful look. He is pensive, still keeping Wednesday at his side for several minutes. When he does let her go it is reluctant; he breathes a note of regret and wipes a tear from her cheek. “Let us see Sire safe together, yes?” Where one might apologize, he changes the subject. Conscience-stricken he may be, Sunday does not wish to portray himself a repentant man. He begs for her forgiveness only in thought.

Fortunately for him, the mere mention of Alpha gives Wednesday the courage to devour her tears.

“I would like that,” she says with a half smile. Her words are cut short with the swipe of a finger against red lashes. “May I borrow your handkerchief? I would not have Our Lord see me like this.”

“Absolutely.”

Plucked from his breast pocket comes a single ply cloth silk and sateen customized with embroidery.

“What Fury do you suppose is vile enough to plot such a black scheme?” Sunday asks with a somewhat gentler air as Wednesday tends to her face. “I cannot imagine what infernal Megæra you let slip into our Lord’s audience room.”

“Hmm? Oh. I don’t think she’s that bad.”

Sunday perks up. Intrigued, he tilts his head. “You know her, then?”

She nods. “I’ve conversed with her on several occasions. If she had some nefarious plot, she would have carried it out by now.”

“Do not misunderstand, Temperance. I have full confidence in your ability to judge the character of others, however I must evaluate her myself. I believe there is no one Our Loud cannot thwart, but I remain cautious when it comes to denizens of the stars.” Sunday was wary of Ozymandias for months even after Alpha told him the Draegon leader was an old friend; his words are true to his hypervigilance.

“Wait.” And Sunday pivots slowly on his heel, turning to meet Wednesday once more.

Wednesday casts her eyes down towards Sunday’s black, leather brogues, fixating on the star-shaped detailing and distinctive Horsebit motif of his expensive footwear. When she forgets to ask her question, she shakes her head in an attempt to jolt herself back to action. Sunday’s gaze is still icy, penetrating, but there is a glint of surprise in his eyes that gives Wednesday the courage to continue.

“Do you…” she asks, diffident, in a voice and with a smile Sunday half recognizes. “Do you know what love is?”

“I am no expert, nevertheless I will answer your question to the best of my ability.” Sunday’s keen facial features soften as he looks at Wednesday with equal parts amazement and alarm, though the latter not wildly so. It is unlike Wednesday to be so… philosophical. He finds himself fascinated by her sudden interest in the abstract and relishes in the opportunity to ponder something so esoteric–carefully and thoroughly–to a willing party. Alpha would never suffer Sunday’s ramblings under any circumstances (he knows few who would), and he, like his Lord, does not relish in the company of others he deems beneath him.

“Like war, where any strategy is accepted,” he continues, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with the elegant tap of an index finger where the frame meets in the middle, “affairs of the heart are also no-holds-barred contests. When the stakes are of great consequence should one lose, there is no act too terrible. It brings to mind the Ten-Year Trojan War. Helen would not be beautiful forever, so Paris chose Aphrodite. Qué será, será. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Love sounds exhausting, and I want no part of it.”

Wednesday pulls her full lips into a bashful smile, fiddling with the sleeve of her sweater. She had anticipated Sunday’s ire and instead received an earnest deduction. “Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it.” He gently pats her head and then guides her down the hall. “Although… I am curious as to the reason behind your question.”

“Let assume Our Lord has a Lord. I think it would be love.”

“Ridiculous. Treasonous, even, but a fascinating supposition. You may continue.”

“When I am with Miss Zhùróng, I feel its presence. It is gannet-like, insatiate, and it wants the world.”

The last click of his high heel punctuates his silence. Wednesday, pressing the tips of her fingers together, steals an upward glance at Sunday’s face, his eye bent down on her in an expression of stern surprise and keen inquiry.

“That is quite an abstract take on a would-be God of Gods.” Of course, Sunday also understands that Wednesday does not think Kohana is that god, rather, she carries it with her somehow. Even if that were true, he does not understand what purpose bringing such an entity to Alpha would serve.

As the two make their way towards the audience chamber, sprinklers release smooth, quiet mist across plots of dill and chamomile. The contemporary moon gates they walk under double as both sculpture and flowerbed; Sunday and Wednesday are flanked by marjoram and the bright green glossy narrow leaves of shamrock inkberry holly.

“Speaking on the assumption that this God of Gods does exist,” Sunday muses as a sudden thought occurs to him, “and I will continue to call it ‘God of Gods’ for simplicity’s sake — I do not think it would be love as I understand it.”

Sunday has made it no secret he considers Wednesday’s words blasphemy, but he remains even-tempered. It is as if the very topic has brought him some sort of solace.

Wednesday leans into Sunday’s tall, imposing figure, resting her head against his muscular forearm. He smiles slightly, syncing his footfalls with hers.

“Infatuation: love that burns bright and fast. Lust: love that rushes, love that fills, a flood of carnal desire.” A pensive cloud looms over his head, softening his chiseled features. There is a slight tremble in his dragon-slaying hands; the sad, resolute look on his face speaks where silence prevails and words fail. He swallows, and perhaps there is shame in it for having committed some terrible offense, real or imagined. “Love has many names — I would like to know what love between creator and creation is called. There must be a proper term.”

Servitude.

He smiles, and it is not a sad or bitter smile but one well-pleased and deeply gratified. “But I digress.”

“Do continue!” Wednesday pleads with an eager, exacting glance cast towards his face.

Sunday enters another bout of introspection, gliding his finger against the curve of his cupid’s bow.

“Imagine, an up-and-coming dancer who wears a very long, red scarf to all of her performances as a signature accessory,” he begins, quite coolly, adopting a dramatic air. “After a year of toil, she makes a purchase with the hard-won fruits of her labor: a convertible car. One day, while driving home from work, her scarf gets caught in the vehicle’s wheel, which violently tears her out of her seat and throws her onto the pavement, killing her instantly. That is what I think the God of Gods would be like. Not a man, not like you and I, but an inevitable accident occurring under highly unusual and unlikely circumstances.”

Wednesday finds her gaze wandering towards a moss-covered statue triumphantly posed atop a marble-wrought pedestal placed at the end of an allée of trees. Limestone panels depicting carved grapes and wheat sheaths distract her. A turtle nestled among a copse of fir trees beckons her thoughts to wander.

I am the butcher’s blade trachea-deep in your jugular.

I am the light-weight shirt clinging to every groove of your sweat-drenched back, the burning sting of old mascara melting into eyes gone bloodshot. I am the electric shock that surges through the circulatory system, the adrenaline rush that activates the fight-or-flight response (the heart is the size of a clenched fist because it is your primordial weapon — wage war, mount an attack, take up arms — fight, never flight, never flee, I won’t let you run, stand your ground, defend yourself).

“A God of Gods would rarely interact with us, and if it does, when it does, it would be nothing less than cataclysm. The world would be remade, reclaimed by nature. A God of Gods would not leave you unaffected by the bite of a viper. A God of Gods would not part the sea with precision. A God of Gods is too big to be exact. It does not know how to bring miraculous deliverance from danger and suffering. It stands to reason that Our Lord, too, would be subject to its intervention.”

I am the sudden, giddy fluttering in the pit of your gut. I am your insides climbing up and out of your torso like morning glory vines reaching up towards the sun. I am the catch in your throat, the tight feeling before the tears fall, the awkward, broken-off surge of pure emotion.

(How could that possibly be? How could this be happening?)

It’s terminal: you are dying of love.

(This isn’t fair. The results are wrong.)

I’m sorry to tell you your situation is not only incurable but unfortunately poorly treatable.

(Please, what if I change? I’ll cut my hair short, I’ll let my beard go.)

After you have a moment to think about this, we can review a couple of options on how to proceed and whether or not trying to do treatment is the right thing for you.

(Nothing will ever be right again. Why go on at all, when my whole life amounts to this.)

Let me know if you understand what I’ve just said and when you’re ready for me to say more.

(This is the hardest stage of grief to endure.)

⋆｡°✩

Hundreds of dazzling florets spill from baskets hanging from the ceiling, voluptuous folds of violet blue petals contrasting dramatically with crimson sepals. Kohana opens her mouth to ask if Alpha decorated his chambers for her but is ensorcelled by golden yellow and orange nasturtiums with striking red flashes inside. Heart-shaped, dark-green leaves variegated with chartreuse and gold in the center bring her eyes towards Alpha sitting comfortably in his throne, quite pleased with her star-struck expression.

His throne room hadn’t looked like this before. The sun-kissed smell of ivy leaves on a stone wall makes her swoon.

“Clotho told me you like flowers,” says Alpha amiably, his voice like thick liquor (dark, syrupy, whiskey-infused), flowing over her and into her skin.

“I…” Kohana begins, but is distracted by the ambience of a mid-August day, its summer balm persisting. The lingering aroma of his chambers is radiant: zesty citron tinted with details of bitter galbanum and petitgrain. “… Still don’t like you. And…” She turns her head slowly, so as not to startle the frolicking deer that are clearly his pets. She glances again at Alpha, opening her mouth as if to say something, but closes it again.

Nectar-rich flowers attract honey bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies; deer and rabbits graze on leaves and twigs. Kohana’s mouth is flooded with the taste of fox meat, coyote bones, and the endless bounty of the Earth. All at once she is overwhelmed with memories of eating wild turkey, bear meat, and squirrels under the beating heart of this planet’s sun. She has kept her primal instinct in check for far too long, her roots reaching deep into the womb of his world–it was only an hour ago that she was flanked by wild lions, wolves, elk, snakes, and birds.

Had he been watching her? Did he see when she sank her teeth into fully-ripened pomegranate fit to bursting (it’s throbbing flesh, its pulsing blood)? Did he see when she drank herself silly on an ever-flowing cup of wine that continually intoxicated her, staining her body red with gore?

The two cosmic beings watch each other for some time, like two vultures on a bare and broken branch. The ever-expanding, combined might of Alpha and Kohana’s power in one room ,  Reality is crushed under the weight of them, existence underfoot begging and praying. The fear the First Universe feels towards them is biblical. Even amongst the silence there is no quiet here: atoms are quaking, reality is rippling.

What strength this unapologetically hungry monster-heroine has. Enough to swallow a man whole. Not every monster devours, this Alpha knows, but the drive to consume—to make short work of his heart, or swallow the sun, or devour the stars—is considerable. Other men would have Kohana politely finish what is on her plate and decline seconds, satisfied and satisfiable, but Alpha is different.

He knows she is fueled by hunger, defined by it, driven by it — far worse than a woman who consumes men in known qualities: Kohana’s hunger is bottomless. She is tough and ancient, tried by a million years of ice and fire. When she looks up at him he sees a tigress with a full belly, her slitted eyes all bright with irrepressible mischief.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” Alpha says, his eyes bright and amused. The deep baritone of his voice knocks Kohana down to the earth. Alpha throws his arms open in a welcoming gesture. “Welcome, Kohana.”

“Why wouldn’t I show up?” comes Kohana’s exasperated sigh. “I told Clotho I’d help you and I’d never hear the end of it if I broke our pinky promise.”

Besides, it’s not like Clotho isn’t watching them as they speak. Kohana and Alpha are her two favorite people; she wouldn’t miss them being in the same room for the world. Not that she particularly cares about any world. In fact, Alpha’s world could crumble right now and she would simply teleport the two of them to a different planet in his Universe to continue their conversation.

Kohana draws deeply on her pipe and takes a few steps towards him, blowing a glimmering swirl of smoke in his direction. She looks up at Alpha’s antlers and her eyes narrow further. “Was making me wait several days to get a proper audience with you really necessary?” she asks, her voice thick and raspy. A tendril of smoke slips from between her lips in something like the shape of a hand making a come-hither gesture towards the king.

“Yes,” is his reply, all deep-toned and velvety-rich. When Alpha shrugs his indifference ripples down from his broad shoulders and across his colossal back. She finds herself staring at where his neck curves into his shoulder as he cocks his head and thinks for a moment. “Do you think you’re special enough to interrupt proper procedure on my planet? Surely you were pleased with your accommodations–”

Kohana grimaces, snapping back to attention. “I didn’t want to stay in your stupid castle!”

Her words are razor-edged, falling out of her mouth like shards of shattered glass. Her eyes are keen and wild, green as sulphuric acid, her skin less Summer-kissed and more scarlet, her blood rushing with so much force that Alpha thinks it might leap out of her. She reminds him of bayonets and barbed wire, diamonds and daggers–a hellcat with a hair trigger.

Her sudden outburst doesn’t bother him, but her recalcitrance does bring him to pause. She has proven nothing in refusing to stay in the most luxurious lodgings his planet can provide. If anything, she’s inconvenienced herself and is now throwing a temper tantrum.

Kohana smiles, but her smile is an animal’s bared teeth. “I am not so easily impressed.” The child’s tantrum has gone from her voice, replaced by something hard and old and strong. She appraises him like a general sizing up a soldier.

“I imagine that’s how you play your tricks, offering days full of power and riches. You’ll find I’m not so easily wooed – gold and beauty will not buy my heart, and so I sought the company of your garden instead.” Her plush lips part into a smug little grin, quite pleased with herself. Kohana has no fear of the dark, or of wild animals, or of places uninhabited by men.

“You slept outside?” Alpha’s lash-fringed eyes widen, interested and amused, and somehow his amusement doesn’t irritate her.

“For an entire week!” She grins coyly up at Alpha. “I ate flowers and drank rainwater.” She pauses, knitting her fingers together as she recalls the place with which she was forbidden to foray. “I was quite surprised by the abundance of fruit and game on your planet. I found a tree and ate its sweet, pulpy fruit. It was vulvic, like eating the flesh and fluid of your world.”

Alpha laughs, and his laugh is as big and broad as his chest, a laugh fit to burst barrels. “Interesting.”

Her innuendo isn’t lost upon him. He stands, three times her height, towering over her like a skyscraper. She keeps her lashes low because it’s too much to look at him, his mouth loose and pink and parted, his eyes shining fiercely, taking in some unfathomable horror and then growing dreamy, hypnotic, cutting through her throat. She begins to feel like a wounded gazelle (and nothing is more dangerous than a cornered wild beast) when, with one attentive finger, Alpha tucks her hair behind an ear—you’ll do everything I want.

She feels his lips close over hers and the shock of this almost-kiss jolts through her like a lightning bolt. “Don’t insult me. There isn’t a pleasure of the flesh I have not sampled.” Each baritone syllable shakes her to the core.

A raspberry red blush burns her cheeks as she looks away, her embarrassment as deep as Scarlet Fire roses. She squeezes her fists till they are the colour of blood. “You think you’re so tall and strong,” comes her retort, almost a hiss, almost a groan. After some sniffling and snorting, she plants her hands on her hips, her face twisting in injured dignity. Alpha’s shrug is followed by the rippling of his broad muscles, which makes Kohana’s eyes crease with embarrassment.

“So what seems to be the problem, Lord Alpha?” comes her sour reply. Though insincere, Kohana bows grandly, sweeping one hand out to the side like she imagines his servants do. “Or should I call you His Radiance?” she asks, in the most elegant, courtly, grandest of accents. “Might I, your lowly servant, inquire after your preferred title?”

“You may call me whatever you like, within reason. I do not think the Enochonetic remiss enough to not have briefed you on our situation.”

“Obviously Clotho didn’t tell me shit, 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 lets out a low chuckle. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

Kohana snorts. “You’re not refusing it.”

“If you want to assist me it is of your own free will, nothing more.”

“And what?” Her voice: a knife buried in the sinews of a king’s heart. “Let the Umbrakinetic have the run of this universe? I don’t think so. As much as I don’t like you, I’ve got a bigger, more pressing matter to attend to.”

“Yes, Clotho spoke briefly about the Summoners and their commitment to the multiverse. What do you fight for? Certainly not for eternal cosmic peace. The war I wage has existed eons before you, and it will endure eons after you are gone.” Alpha pauses, closing his eyes. “Perhaps you should accept that some conflicts are beyond even you, General Ohuang-Zhùróng.”

“It’s Kohana,” she briskly corrects. “Listen, Antlers, your universe is rotting. I assume your war has to do with your universe’s decay, and if that’s true I have to know what’s causing it. If we’re going to work together, let’s not keep secrets.” The First universe exists as sleeping darkness, unknowable, unknown, wholly immersed in deep slumber. This universe is ever-perishing, ever-changing, waking and sleeping, incessantly revivifying and destroying itself. It reminds her of Isleen.

“I’ve only known you for a second and already you’re demanding things I haven’t confided in with my closest consorts.”

Kohana leans in towards Alpha, outstretching her arms like a cat stretching after eating an overly-filling meal. She reaches for him, grasping, grinning, her eyes gleaming. “Here, I’ll tell you a secret first. The entire time we’ve been talking, I’ve been wondering how big your cock is.”

Alpha doesn’t even blink. “More than you can handle. Anything else?”

Kohana snorts, turning her nose up at his indifference, sitting back up and crossing her arms in indignation. “Asshole.”

Muttering to herself, her lips curl into a smirk as she exhales a thick cloud of smoke. “You think you’re too good for me, huh?” She cocks her head to the side, looking at him through full, fringed lashes, her gaze casting a wicked spell. “You’ll want to fight or fuck me”–a pause, the quirk of a brow, and a haughty chuckle delays the end of her sentence–“eventually.”

“Cunt,” is what Alpha would have said had he been a lesser man, but his smile remains. He retains his majesty, the magnificence with which he carries himself–such is the duty of a king.

But oh, if he could tear her apart, rip her limb from limb for insinuating he is even a little bit attracted to her, he’d have her running out of his throne room in tears. The audacity of it all, the sheer magnitude of her ego; he can’t stand it. “What’s wrong? Don’t tell me a little rejection riles you so. I didn’t think you were so easily hurt.”

Clotho, watching the two of them afar in a distant universe (for one cannot be omniscient without being omnipresent), finds herself suddenly jealous and does not know who she envies more. Her eyes are murky, shaded by pity and loathing and contempt; she feels a hole in her heart shaped like a bullet wound. She purses her lips together, fighting the urge to plunge her hand into her abdomen and rip out her intestines in order to make a rough-and-ready noose.

Or perhaps they would like her blacker-than-black heart, as dark as a midnight winter’s night, served up to them on a sterling silver platter.

Clotho is full of terrible, sear-white light, a ripping, a gouging, a tearing; her head–flooded with thoughts of being left behind, of being abandoned–is set ablaze with righteous fury and rancorous light. Her halo, an ouroboros of warmth and grace incinerates the universe she’s in, swallowing it whole in an instant, setting the multiverse alight–then a crescendo of silence.

She stands back, straight-spined, and stares the duo down with eyes as cold as dead hands, so lonely and ever full of sorrow.

Clotho was sure Alpha and Kohana were like oil and water and would sooner go for each other’s throats than get along in any respect, and yet here they are, between the beat and bickering, discussing solutions to Alpha’s impossible-to-solve problem. What makes Kohana so willing and eager to help? What makes Alpha so yielding to her antics? The two of them becoming friends would be bad on its own, but doing so without her permission? She’d have their heads. They cannot fathom the things Clotho would do to punish them.

“I haven’t allowed it,” Clotho says under her breath, turning her head, considering the circumstances. “I’d never allow it.”

“Alphie and Kitty Kat!” Clotho says very sweetly.

Alpha wrinkles his nose at Clotho’s sugary voice, whereas Kohana’s green eyes spark beneath knitted brows. At first Kohana laughs, a bark, a snap of an electric bolt, and then she seethes, her lips pulling back from her teeth like a lioness. “Clotho,” she says with a feline-slitted, serrated glare. The Enochonetic’s silhouette shimmers brilliantly in the warm, syrupy afternoon sunlight spilling into Alpha’s chamber. “I told you not to call me that.”

Clotho laughs, bright and full, holding on to her cheeks to keep her smile from flying away. Suspended in the air by the halo at her feet, Clotho floats up to Kohana so that they’re eye-level. “But you like it when I call you that.” Clotho curtsies, floating a full inch higher. “Right?” This time she asks in a half-whisper, like a gentle breeze’s caress: “Don’t you?”

Clotho’s steadfast love endures forever. Her smile grows deeper and wider and kinder and brighter until it’s brutal, and then she puts a hard, cold, possessive hand on the Summoner’s shoulder. “You like it because I like it.” And then she laughs, her expression delighted and cruel like a child who has played an especially good joke. “Just kidding! I was only teasing. I’ve a heart like a big lump of sugar, I could never be mad at you.”

The softening of Kohana’s expression is accompanied by a short, sharp laugh. “If you were anyone else…”

Clotho looks up at Kohana, her pale pink eyes wide and dear. “What would you do? Tell me! Tell me!”

Kohana grins her feral grin, a grin she hopes promises of games and prank-filled afternoons and dangerous adventures that allude even Clotho’s omniscience. “Ask Alpha.”

Before Alpha can utter a word, Sunday and Wednesday walk into the audience chamber with the former marked by vigilance and the latter surprised to see Clotho again in the company of both her Lord and Kohana. Pleased to see Wednesday, Kohana tips her head down slightly and gives her a coy, tight-lipped smile. There is an exaggerated, provocative sway to her hips as she closes the gap between them; the click of Kohana’s six-inch heels against the floor makes Wednesday go weak at the knees in swoon.

“Hello again, my lovely little nonnette.”

“M-miss Zhùróng! I um, I’m h-happy to see you! Always happy to see you and -”

“And who are you?” Clotho asks the two Powers, her voice a little too soft to hear. Her eyes gleam with a curiosity like hunger, eager, all-devouring. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

Sunday twists his face up into a snarl. “This isn’t the time for introductions! Where is my Lord you harlot!”

Clotho turns to Sunday and smiles. It is a frightening smile, one that lights up the whole of Heaven. Her halo manifests behind her, an extraordinary crème-chiffon colour, a smear of sharp light against Alpha’s hyacinths.

“I am the Echonianetic, the multiversal manifestation of life. I am to be and to become. I undergo death and remain deathless. Your life is overshadowed by mine, little ladybug. My first mother, Ananke, self-formed at the dawn of creation–an incorporeal, serpentine being whose outstretched arms encompassed the breadth of the cosmos. My second mother, Nyktos, the black, the empty, the primordial foundation of all manifested forms, the ground of potentiality for everything that exists.”

Sunday, suspicious of Clotho’s claims and eager to reunite with Alpha, closes the space between himself and her. Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, Sunday bends down and stares into Clotho’s eyes with his eyes of fire. Gently, he picks her up by the armpits, her legs dangling helplessly beneath her as he inspects her further.

“What a strange child.” She’s featherlight, so he concludes her bones must be hollow (if she even has them…); Clotho’s blush creeps down her neck and into her soul, so embarrassed she is at being toted around like a doll.

Wednesday gasps, covers her mouth with both hands, and then tries to pretend she hadn’t. “S-Sunday…?” She smiles and then chokes on it.

“What?” His face snaps back into its usual irritated expression. “Surely you don’t believe such nonsense.”

Kohana takes a long drag of her smoke pipe, gesturing towards Sunday. “Might I be the harlot you’re looking for?”

“You,” Sunday spits, as if the word itself is acid-coated, curlingly bitter. The hatred in his voice is thick and viscous, an oily-dark, venom-coloured malice; his rage blusters inside of him as he manages to keep it at bay by a very small margin. “If I find out you’ve made an attempt on my Master’s life, I’ll–”

“I can assure you I have not harmed one silvery hair on your precious god’s head.” Kohana cuts him off, exhaling a star-laden haze of cosmic gas and dust into his face in an inappropriately casual way. There is mischief in her cat-slitted, chartreuse-coloured eyes, the kind that pokes and provokes for no reason in particular. If she had a tail it would be held high behind her with a little twitch at the tip–happiness entirely at Sunday’s expense. “Unless you want me to. In which case, I am happy to oblige.”

Wednesday looks at Sunday and sees earthquakes, land and ice slips, meteor strikes. His face is creased in anger so palpable she can taste it.

Nervous, she curls her index finger against her chin; this could easily escalate into a full-blown duel to the death and she would be powerless to stop it. Alpha could intervene, but he won’t, because he is entertained by Kohana and Sunday’s banter. She can tell by his body language. His muscles are loose and his eyes are smiling. His gaze is relaxed – he observes Kohana and Sunday without staring, with little blinking.

Wednesday raises a hand above her head, her palm open and facing forward, enforcing order and turn-allocation. Sunday and Kohana are both gagged by this gesture; she has their attention in an instant without saying a single word.

“My Lord,” she says quietly, and with some fear and trepidation, “forgive me if this is impudent, but I must ask… What is love?”

Alpha, who had been holding his chin between his bent forefinger and thumb, strokes his cheek up and down with the back of his fingers. He is confident, his head held up and tilted slightly back.

“Love is a tool of subjugation. It is important to ask yourself two questions when flirting with the idea of a relationship. The first: how will love serve me? Next: how will my public perception be impacted as a result? Anything else hardly matters. You must meet your needs first, even at the expense of your significant other. Especially at the expense of your significant other.”

“Oh.”

“Aww, Alphie, don’t say that!” Clotho blurts out. In her excitement she floats over to Wednesday and squeezes her cheeks together. “Don’t listen to him Wednesday, he’s just a bitter, crusty old man.”

“M-my Lord isn’t c-crusbty.”

“It’s better she knows the whole of it now.” Alpha says, folding his arms across his broad chest. “She will be happier than she is in her current state of ignorance.”

“An astute answer, my Lord,” Sunday affirms. “I also do not appreciate you calling my Lord ‘crusty,’ Clotho. Please refrain from doing so again.”

“No promises,” Clotho replies, releasing Wednesday’s face. She grins at Sunday, wide and genuine. “You’re kind of crusty too.”

Is Alpha surprised the others don’t appreciate his sagely advice? No. His boundaries are rigid, his self-esteem compulsive. He holds his autonomy and independence above all else, whereby his need for relationships–platonic or otherwise–is near none. Anyone wise knows vulnerability is a sign of weakness, an invitation for others to exploit them. Love has never served him, has never suited him. People are unpredictable and unreliable, as is human nature; there are few he respects enough to court.

Kohana, who had been looking at Alpha with a deadpan expression following his ‘advice’, finally feels inclined to join the conversation. “Very utilitarian,” she scoffs. She smiles a long, slow, sarcastic smile in an attempt to mask her thinly-veiled aggression.

With just a handful of sentences, Alpha reminds Kohana of every lover she’s ever had. In him she sees the emotionally inexpressive and unavailable Isleen, the highly punitive and avoidant General Ardouisur, and a third, unwelcome familial guest with whom she holds no fondness: the cruel dismissiveness of her father. Worse still is the knowledge that she is no better than that man, tormented by the urge to merge with her lovers in a way that can only be described as symbiotic-hostile.

“If my impression of you is correct, General Ohuang-Zhùróng, we share the same opinion.” And there it is, Alpha’s signature triumphant grin. That look of pure, malevolent glee ushered in by a short laugh coy and insincere.

“Hah.” Her tone is dangerously dry. In lieu of following up her comment, she takes another lengthy drag of her pipe. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Oh, he knows.

He knows you learned daddy’s old tricks.

He knows your greatest fear is losing control over your lovers so you respond with intense anger to any suspicion of abandonment or being let down. He knows you scorn your partners’ excessive need for closeness while also wanting exclusive control of that closeness. He knows you agree with him because you are just like him, an extremely vulnerable broken thing that would rather die before admitting it, before letting someone else in.

“Wednesday, no matter what you do, don’t ever, ever fall in love with someone like Alpha.”

The god-king snorts at Kohana and raises a brow, the rippling of broad muscles following thereafter as he folds his arms across his chest. Alpha’s hair: starry-white and pearl-silk, every shimmer of silver from stone to snow, glossy and pale over powerful legs, streaks of light like curving ivory knives around him. His eyes pry into Kohana’s ribcage, skewering through her heart; she allows the violent invasion of his gaze, a wry smile dancing upon her lips as if to beckon more of his ire.

–But it’s her eyes, the radioactive fury of them, vats of sulphuric acid pulsating with the desire to see him dead, that’s what captivates him.

He understands now why Clotho brought her here. He feels like he did when he waged war before the First, where battle was new between old blood and the ineffable. There is something primal in her that speaks to the omnipotent-ender in him, a challenge without words, a dare, a promise: kill me if you can.

There are some things that can only be resolved in blood.

This, too, is love.

“Let’s see how alike we really are,” Kohana hisses in a condescending sneer, tossing a quick, inquisitive glance around the audience chamber. “I’m going to assume you don’t care much about your garden. I don’t see you as the gardening type.”

“Ah. Oh dear.” Clotho clicks her tongue against the ceiling of her mouth, turning her back towards Alpha and Kohana. She hops across the air, gesturing towards Sunday and Wednesday. Taking one of Sunday’s hands into her own, she gently guides him towards the door. “We better leave. They’re going to fight, I think.”

“Unhand me,” Sunday snaps, jerking away from her. “I don’t care who you are, you will not take me away from my Lord.”

Clotho puffs out her big, round cheeks and lets out a lungful of steamy breath. Her lips pull back in a snarl.

A loud, booming burst of noise splits one of Sunday’s eardrums, and when he passes a look at the unaffected Wednesday his suspicions are confirmed: he was the only one who heard it. The constant grumble of electricity ravaging the tiny, lever-like bones in his head is inexplicable–even Kohana and Alpha aren’t aware of it as far as he can tell.

“Shut up.” Clotho’s words are caustic and burning like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Gone is the bubbly multiversal manifestation of life – she now speaks with all the wrath of a supercell thunderstorm.

To Sunday’s surprise, Clotho’s anger is instantaneous, hair-raising and utterly debilitating. He cannot speak, he cannot move, and blood begins to ooze down his neck.

Alpha’s audience chamber is no longer beautiful. It has been claimed by decomposing stumps and dead branches that have gone baby’s-breath brittle. The smell of Bradford pears in full bloom assaults Sunday’s senses; he gags on the taste of fish turned sour, urine and other pungent bodily fluids. Dense layers of dog excrement slowly segue into dark, rich humus rotting down, becoming soil; the ground is bare and wet underfoot, teeming with earthworms, beetles, mites and slugs. Sunday takes in a frantic gasp of air and swallows down the primordial ooze of a forest’s floor being devoured by fungi and slime mold.

For the first time in Sunday’s long-lived existence, he is scared.

He is terrified.

It’s only now that he realizes the strongest being in the room is her.

“We are leaving precisely because you are weak and will be killed in the crossfire. Your weakness is the reason why I can’t watch them try to kill each other, which already infuriates me.” Clotho is bright, too bright, so bright he feels as if he is being reduced to ash from the inside. “Be a good boy and follow Wednesday and I, if you know what’s good for you. I’d let you drop dead if you weren’t one of Alpha’s precious playthings.”

…And speaking of Alpha, he lives everyday surrounded by love and luxury, his every whim made manifest by his Powers and subjects. He is respected, endlessly worshiped but then Kohana, who has known him for a handful of days, asks to fight him?

Asks to fight God?

This is beyond absurd.

“You are given permission to die,” Alpha says in a fervor most grand, his arms outstretched to meet Kohana in rancorous rapture, “if that is your wish.”

And perhaps this is the only rapture he knows, to destroy and be destroyed, to struggle, to subjugate, so dull life is without conflict, so meaningless death without dragging someone along down deep into the depths, for what satisfaction is there in dying alone?