We move through the city in loose formation, Howl on point with Harlequin by her side to eat any surprise attacks from the wildlife. I’m in the middle with Agatha, Delilah stalking to our right, and Ferromancer brings up the rear. Ferromancer’s added a fancy new weapon to her arsenal: a handheld device that uses electromagnetic force to propel non-explosive projectiles at incredible speeds. In other words, a railgun, which Mike has wasted literal hours of my life ranting about at length. Apparently the non-magical versions have a long list of problems prohibiting them from seeing widespread adoption and miniaturization, none of which I expect to see from Ferromancer’s design. The handle of the railgun is connected by cable to Ferromancer’s suit, because apparently it needs to draw power from an external source—which is also why I can’t burn one into the furnace and make my own personal railgun, to my great despair. Mike would have been so jealous. As we pass into the entertainment district and the ads for magical girls increase in frequency, birds start to . At first just a few, and only notable because there have been no normal animals in the World of Glass, but quickly their numbers become concerning. Dozens of crows, pigeons, eagles, and more, an even mix of birds that should be in the PNW and birds that really, really shouldn’t. Then Howl shoots one of them. A vulture falls out of the sky to splat against the pavement, and up close we can see bulging, human eyes in both its sockets and embedded at random across the creature’s face. “I call ‘em seeya birds,” she says. “‘Cause they’re birds that ‘see ya,’ get it?” She looks unduly pleased with herself. “Is that all they do?” Ferromancer asks, inspecting the corpse and poking at it with the tip of her gun. Howl shrugs. “As far as I’ve seen. They’ve always been more of an oddity than a threat. The weird part is that they didn’t show up until now; usually they’re everywhere. Probably our meddler again.” “Then we should kill them all,” Delilah advises, a black-bladed knife in hand. The birds don’t react to her, same as they didn’t react to one of their own getting sniped. “Do we have time for that?” Agatha asks, staring up at the night sky and the full moon. “We’ve been here, what, two hours now? Five hours seems like a lot, but I don’t think we’ve made much progress.” “That’s the upper bound,” Howl warns. “I haven’t sensed any timeflow disturbances, but they can happen in this realm. Take potshots if you like, but we should keep moving.” “There’s time fuckery here!?” I ask with glee at the same time that Agatha asks much the same with polite language and a horrified tone. We do, at least, follow Howl’s advice and stay mobile as she explains. I join Howl in shooting arrows at birds, and Agatha reluctantly joins in with a few spells. Harlequin doesn’t have a ranged option, so they stick by us. Ferromancer’s gun is way too overkill—plus, that would be time away from analyzing all the data she’s been gathering. Delilah tries to fly at the seeya birds, but can’t get around the ceiling limit. “Time mostly lines up between this world and our world,” Howl tells us, “but there are pockets—usually very obvious—where that’s disrupted. Fracture zones are the most dangerous because each individual fracture has its own altered relationship with time. Moonspawn can keep you anchored in the midnight hour. It seems to be a rule that if something can fuck with your sense of time, you’ll be able to see it coming.” More of that artificiality. “You said ‘usually’ very obvious,” I point out. “Is there an exception to the rule?” “Maybe,” she says, dropping another seeya bird with a clean shot. All her animals are roving about now, with Huginn and Muninn pecking at their rivals while Fenris cleans up some of the dead birds with gusto. “I haven’t confirmed it myself, but the talkers in this place attribute mastery of time and space to royalty. So, if our golden-eyed stranger really is from here…” “Then the flow of time could alter at any moment,” I finish. That gets a shiver from Agatha and a clap of excitement from Harlequin. Something comes to mind and I chew on it. “You said you could sense it if that happens. Is that related to how you could tell I was a dreamer? Harlequin seemed to know it, too, and a magical girl I met on a job.” “Those with eyes have but to see,” the clown contributes. They tilt their head, looking at Howl. “This one sees further than most—even me. Curious.” “It’s a trick you can learn once you’ve been doing this long enough,” Howl answers. “Anyone who has the dream can recognize other dreamers with a bit of practice. It’s… a connection to the World of Glass. I’m just a little better at exploiting that connection than my peers, so I can push the trick a little further.” “Hey, guide,” Delilah interrupts, wandering over, “why do your arrows go through the ‘ceiling’ when I can’t?” Huh. That’s actually a good question. I look to Howl, curious about the answer. She shrugs and says, “It’s magic, it reads things differently. My birds also go through. Best guess? It registers our flight as ‘unnatural’ in some way. Try climbing the wall, that usually works for me.” “I hate this place,” Delilah mutters, and then she turns around and transforms into a pile of spiders that crawl up the nearest building and start devouring seeya birds. I blink. “That’s. Okay! That’s her power. What the fuck!?” Agatha looks green around the gills. “Oh dear.” Spiders-Delilah turns back into a person after her feast and tests Howl’s theory further by jumping from one building to another, which works. I’m morbidly fascinated to the point that a part of me is disappointed when that method is too slow to keep up with the rest of us and she rejoins the group on the ground. The area in front of the Visage Spire is an open courtyard around a marble fountain, a thousand coins shining below the water. High-class restaurants compete with Starbucks and McDonalds for the sheer marketing power of being photographed next to the Spire—and for the business of being the closest food options on a tour. They all proudly advertise Visage merch and Visage-themed menu items: Dusk & Dawn paired lattes! Home to Radiance’s favorite steak! The Spire itself is a towering edifice of glass and steel, built serpentine and clean. The name of the building is displayed in simple lettering over the equally understated entrance, as if bragging that they don’t need to brag. The golden orb above—held aloft by magic between two tine-like protrusions—sends a different message. This close to the tower, a lot more detail is visible. The glow around the tower is multicolored and has a sense of movement to it, like light being drawn into the tower and absorbed—that must be the energy that Ferromancer talked about. The orb’s strange texture, uncertain from a distance, resolves into a feather-like pattern repeating across its surface. Chains of golden light cross the doors of the Spire, a barrier like the one I passed through in the Ossuary. No symbol helpfully glows to tell us who might have put the barrier there. I glance behind me at Ferromancer. “Chains look familiar.” She nods. “A cousin to the Morrigan’s work. I’ll investigate.” There’s not much I can do to help with that, so I take a seat by the fountain and watch the seeya birds while Ferromancer floats over to the Spire entrance and takes readings. Harlequin and Howl join my teacher by the door, Harlequin doing handstands to entertain themself while the other two talk shop. Delilah spider-swarms up the side of the courtyard Starbucks and gets back to hunting. Agatha joins me by the fountain and fiddles with her glasses. “I keep thinking about using my power again, but I’m afraid that the tower will be even worse than the deimovore,” she admits to me. “I should have used it more on the way here. I’m pretty useless without it.” “Hey, that’s better than me; I’m only here on nepotism. I haven’t seen a single magic item to copy.” The lack of things to steal annoys me more than I’ll ever admit. “But if you want to try your power again, I’ll hold your hair back while you puke into the fountain,” I joke. Agatha giggles. “A classic girls’ night. Thanks. But if Ferromancer is correct about the purpose of the Spire, it probably connects to everything in the city. I guess that would be an added bit of confirmation, if we needed it.” I shrug. “It’s up to you. You saved my bacon back in the forest, so I’m not going to judge if you want to take it easy. There’ll probably be plenty of stuff worth giving an eye once we’re inside the tower.” This story has been stolen from NovelHub. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Just then, an eerie creaking echoes from above. Immediately, everyone looks up—myself and Agatha at the fountain, Delilah atop a shop, and the other three by the front door to the tower. The golden orb atop the Visage Spire is drifting out of place. It floats down from its levitating perch, descending toward us, and as it descends it unfurls great wings of golden feathers. The seams along the surface of the orb are the dividing lines of seven angelic wings, glittering and majestic, that spread wide to reveal the hidden interior of the orb: a gigantic bloodshot eye, its iris golden, its pupil a crude triskelion. The angel screams, a ghastly wail that scrapes against my ears and rattles my bones, and then it tries to kill us. Golden wings flex back, snap forward, and fling a hundred feathers into the courtyard. Howl reacts the quickest of us, leaping into cover with her wolf while Agatha and I scramble to get out of the way. Each feather impacts with terrifying force, cracking concrete and shattering the marble fountain—though they bounce off the tower, leaving it completely untouched. Harlequin takes one dead on and goes splat, Ferromancer throws up an energy shield just in time to blunt another, and I take a feather-javelin in the goddamn wing—tearing it off for the second time this month, god fucking dammit. Delilah, standing atop the rubble of McDonalds, stares up at the giant floating eye and shouts at it, “Why do you all get to fly!? Where’s the fucking justice!?” Our retaliation is swift. Agatha flips open her spellbook and starts launching ice shards into the gelatinous mass of the eye. I conjure a new gun to join her. Howl’s birds get swatted out of the sky by a flap of golden wings, but her arrows find purchase with unerring accuracy. Ferromancer lines up a shot, the air around her filling with the hum and crackle of electromagnetism, and then she fires. The eye takes the rest of our attacks without complaint, its surface riddled with pinpricks dripping pinkish-red fluid, but when the railgun fires it raises a wing with surprising speed to block the shot. Golden feathers sizzle, melt, and fracture where the projectile impacted. The not-quite-blood falling from the angel shudders and writhes when it hits the ground. There’s an unsettling viscosity to the substance that becomes much more unsettling when each scattered globule rises and expands into a feminine shape. Misshapen pink ooze gestures at skirted forms, pigtails, and heart-tipped wands, and then a dozen crude facsimiles of magical girls are lurching at us—which finally gives our melee fighters something to do. Delilah dives into the battle with gusto, fluidly switching between forms. As a swarm of spiders, she surrounds and devours her prey. In human form, her black knives swipe through red goop and cause it to wither and dissolve. Harlequin splorches back together and joins the fray alongside Howl’s wolf, the two smashing through goop girls with callous, energetic ease. I take a break from shooting to form a screening line of explosive imps, then get back to it. I know every shot is just going to make more enemies for the others to fight, but I don’t have anything better in my arsenal to hurt this eldritch angel freak. I swoosh across the battlefield, weaving around ooze, to set down next to Ferromancer. My teacher fires off another railgun shot, this one blocked by a different wing to the same effect. “Let me transform your gun!” Ferromancer pauses, finger on the trigger to charge another shot, and then she says, “Do it,” and pushes the gun into my hands. I take it gratefully, relieved that she’s trusting me. “Agatha!” she calls. “Help me on defense.” Agatha flies over to join us and starts casting a barrier spell, with Ferromancer erecting multiple barriers of her own as soon as Agatha is inside the radius. I take a deep breath, reach for my flame, and pull all of it—even the comms devices, which I’ll have to remake if we win this fight—back into myself. Then I pour it into the gun. Emerald flame surges from my hand and wreathes Ferromancer’s railgun. The technomagical superweapon greedily absorbs every ounce of magic I give it, warping as it takes on my colors—green and purple and gold. I push the magic out until I’m shivering, until I’m freezing, and then even further. I unleash the whole of my internal furnace into this weapon. It needs to work. I have to give it everything. Up above, the eye turns on us. Its golden iris begins to glow with a sickly light, and some of the energy streaming into the Visage Spire breaks off and is drawn into the eye instead. It’s charging something. Howl gets out of the potential blast zone and stops shooting at the angel, refocusing her efforts on the castoff facsimiles to keep them away from us. Harlequin bites off one of their own fingers, tosses it aside, and climbs on top of the outermost shield protecting our group of three. Their flesh bubbles, and from each bubble a new Harlequin stretches and grows until there’s a pile of bodies stacked between us and the eye. I keep pouring flame. A wave of blinding golden light surges out of the eye and burns through the mound of Harlequin copies, disintegrating them all in an instant. In the next, it shatters Agatha’s barrier and slams against the first of Ferromancer’s. Another barrier shatters, then another, and then there’s only one left. Ferromancer pulls the railgun from my hands, starts charging it, and aims into the wave of light. I sag against her, watching our doom unfold with glassy, unblinking eyes. Agatha reads from her tome and manages to conjure a final barrier just in time to meet the next surge, then bleeds from the nose and collapses as the wave of light—flickering now, fading—crashes through the last of Ferromancer’s shields. Cracks spiderweb across the final barrier—the light flickers out—and it shatters an instant later. Where there were wings, there are scattered feathers. Where there was an iris, there is a hole. One moment the eye watches us with baleful intent, and the next moment there is no eye, only its detritus. The corpse of the angel lurches out of the sky and crashes into a building, flattening it. The goop monsters dissolve. Dust rises and settles. I’m finding it hard to breathe. I’m so cold that I’m warm again, and Ferromancer is saying something to me but I can’t quite make it out. She’s putting my hand on the gun. It’s so warm. My flame. With a gasp I pull my flame back into me and it comes all at once, my chest igniting in searing pain as all the power I expended is returned to me. The railgun crumbles to pieces, shattering under the weight of sudden change. “Sorry,” I mumble into my teacher’s shoulder. It takes me a moment to regain my sense of balance and stand upright on my own. I flex my wings—the severed one grew back at some point while I was distracted pouring flame. “You did good,” Ferromancer chuckles. “Well worth one gun.” The others are all recovering in their own ways. Harlequin regrows from the finger they tossed aside. Delilah, who had scattered in spider form, returns to humanity. Howl is walking toward the fallen angel, Fenris at her side. Agatha is slowly waking at our feet. Ferromancer helps Agatha up, then suddenly goes still. “Archon. Get to the eye. Now.” I don’t hesitate. I race for the corpse at max speed, willing my flight to go faster, and out of the corner of my vision I see Delilah doing the same. The leviathan is deflating, not quite dissolving like its castoffs but shifting into something loose and layered and flowing. On the edge of it, something glitters. I reach the glittering object mere moments before Delilah and pull it from the angel’s corpse: a golden disc, ornate and decorated. I see it for barely a second before devouring it with Prometheus and sending it to my furnace. “You bitch!” she screams at me, hands clawing at my wrist just a little too late. Check latest chapters at 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭•𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮•𝘯𝘦𝘵 I shove her off me and pull a gun on her. “Don’t push me, bug. Finders keepers.” The Syndicate witch hisses at me. “There should have been a discussion! You filthy, thieving parasite!” “Everyone shut the hell up,” Howl snaps. “We’ve got bigger problems.” As the mass of the eye continues to deflate, it becomes clear what it’s turning into: yellow fabric, rolls and rolls of it, stretching all across the rubble of whatever building it destroyed in the fall. In the center of that vast heap of cloth, draped in yellow, a figure stands. It wears the corpse of the angel like a hooded cloak, its body a thing of pure shadow, its face hidden behind a pallid, smiling mask. Golden eyes shine through. “Well done,” she congratulates us. Her voice tells me she’s a woman, but there’s a gap in my mind when I try to process why. Her tone is both measured and mirthful, like a practiced jester holding back a laugh. It sounds at once both totally alien and as familiar as my own. Ferromancer, Agatha, and Harlequin join the rest of us by the angel corpse’s edge, staying just beyond the still-settling waves of yellow silk. “Who are you?” Ferromancer asks directly. Everyone with a weapon is pointing it at the stranger in the pallid mask. “Royalty,” the stranger says glibly. She bows so deep as to mock us, and then she says, “I am one more body upon the stage, in pallid mask and silken garb. Once, before the beginning, I came to this world an outsider and crowned myself its king. I ruled this land of dreams and nightmares, garbed in shades of sunlight, and I told stories of other worlds to my children and their servants. I have known many names, but among friends such as these only one shall suffice: There is a moment of silence, all six of us enthralled by her speech, and then Howl says, “Bullshit. The fuck you are. No fucking way.” “Don’t say that name!” Agatha shouts, looking panicked and on the verge of hyperventilating. “That’s the King in Yellow, oh my god that’s the King in Yellow, whatever you do please do not say that name three times! We’re all going to die or go insane, oh god, oh god!” “More fucking books?” Delilah demands, sounding pissed off at the very idea of reading. “Stay close to me, Archon,” Ferromancer says quietly. Harlequin cackles beside us. I keep staring at the stranger—at Hastur—at the King in Yellow. I can’t look away. Somehow, beneath that pallid mask, I know she’s smiling. “A pleasure to meet you all in person,” she says, straightening up from her bow. “I have watched your story from afar, holding sympathy for your lot; the forces that scheme against you have been terribly careful in their keeping of secrets. Allow me to part that curtain and reveal the faces of your foes—ah, but first, and you must forgive this indulgence: one more test for the scions of Jupiter. It is in my nature.” The King in Yellow snaps invisible fingers and everything goes black. In the space between one reality and the next, I am watched by golden eyes. “Your story is closest to the heart,” Hastur whispers to me. “A tale of love and of tragedy. One girl’s quest to save her hero. What lines will you cross to steal fire from the gods and set right the stage?” I try to answer, but my mouth won’t move. “Let us find out together, my dear, what it truly means to save Sophia Lane.”