It’s time to kill Delilah. I don’t think any of us are really surprised by her betrayal—Harlequin looks eager, Agatha resigned—but Howl’s the first to actually do something about it. Her bow was already out, hackles raised by Jupiter’s prison. Howl releases two arrows in quick succession, both of which tear through Delilah bloodlessly, leaving spiders in their wake. “You’re first,” the traitor hisses, and then she lunges for Howl. The rest of us explode into action. Ferromancer throws up another energy barrier and Agatha rushes to her side before doing the same. Two drones fly out from beneath Ferromancer’s cloak—were they hiding as part of her armor?—and shoot lasers at Delilah, who melts into spiders wherever she’s struck. Agatha pelts the enemy witch with fire, ice, and lightning, just like in the forest with the deimovore. Howl is matching Delilah’s black-bladed knives with twin knives of her own, longer than Delilah’s but lacking that corrosive edge. Harlequin leaps into the melee and starts throwing punches and taking hits for Howl. So what the hell am I supposed to do? I’ve been building my arsenal, but I’m not sure any of my weapons are right for the situation. Getting into melee with Thunderclap’s axe sounds like a recipe for disaster, but shooting into melee sounds equally terrible, be it the high-powered gun or the foam arrows from my bow. Would my familiars do anything but get in the way of my allies? I designed them all under the assumption that I’d be fighting alone, not with a team. The rıghtful source is 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭⚫𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦⚫𝘯𝘦𝘵 This is the problem with being a generalist instead of a specialist. I have a bunch of tools, but I don’t feel supremely confident in any of them the way that Agatha and Ferromancer must to fire so freely into a pitched battle with two allies. Though, part of that is probably trusting that Howl can dodge and Harlequin doesn’t care about getting hit. Maybe I should just pick the foam arrows, since I can dismiss any that hit an ally. As I start reaching for the bow’s blueprint in my furnace, another schematic flashes in my mind: the strange item I pulled from the angel’s wreckage. I have no idea what it does, but I’d bet money that Hastur put it there for a reason. Trial by fire, then. Live test. I summon the golden disc and take a closer look at it. It’s almost exactly the size of my palm. The back of it is smooth and flat, but the front is covered in symbols; small runes or glyphs circle the outer edge, while the center bears a strange triskelion design on a raised surface that looks like it could be pressed down. The three legs of the symbol are all different: one short and nearly straight, one long and curved, and one that’s almost in the shape of a question mark. Delilah—who is now more spiders than woman—whips her head around to look directly at me. The eight eyes on her mask flash bright red, and then in an instant she reforms her body and leaps over Howl and Harlequin to rush straight for me. Fuck! I panic and almost freeze, but some part of me—the combat instincts I gained when I became a witch—stays focused. I clutch the disc tightly and click its solitary button. Delilah vanishes, along with everything else. In the blink of an eye, I’ve gone from Hastur’s theater to standing on a wooden platform in the mountains. Disorientation hits me like one of Bombshell’s punches. It feels worse than when I went through the portal to reach the World of Glass. What just happened? Where am I now? It takes a few seconds for my vision to stop swimming. I’m… on a tower of some kind. Mostly wood, lots of crisscrossing beams, stairs down. An observation post? The platform I’m on is high up the structure, a walkway around what almost looks like a cabin. Through tall windows I can see a big room with a bed, a kitchen, a computer, and a ladder leading further up. And I’m in the mountains. The Olympic Mountains, I realize, because I can see Forks below me. Down past the snowy peaks and the forested slopes, the city is bright and full of activity. It’s still dark out, the sun not yet creeping over the horizon, but in the east I can see the faintest hint of purple against black. The Visage Spire is untouched. The orb is there, looking as it always does, with no sign of our battle. Does that mean I’m back in the real world? Or am I still in the World of Glass, and Hastur just cleaned up our mess? I float tentatively off the platform and start rising. Nothing stops me or slows me down, and I clear the height of the lookout tower with no issue. In the air, I pull out my phone and check the connection. Low signal—I am in the mountains—but not none like I was told to expect from the World of Glass. I open the group chat and see absolute nonsense being posted. Mike is babbling about an eagle and the other two are spamming badger emojis. The messages are recent. “This is weird,” I mutter aloud, talking about the situation and not my freak friends. “Hastur? Hastur. Hastur!” Nothing happens. I return to the platform. The golden disc is still in my hand, the symbol-etched circle once again raised. I press it back down and immediately the mountains disappear and I’m standing inside the King in Yellow’s theater again, the battle raging on between Delilah and my allies. In the few seconds of disorientation before I get my bearings, I’m buried in spiders. Eight thousand legs skitter across my skin and over my eyes and into my ears and mouth as I flail and try to shake them off. Two thousand fangs nip at my flesh and inject their payload of venom. I can feel them everywhere, inescapable and agonizing, as my outsides are lacerated and my insides dissolve. I call my flame to try and burn them off me, but of course my flame doesn’t burn anything until it’s invested in something physical. The disc is still in my hand, clutched tight, and for half a second my fevered mind considers using it, but then I’d be alone with Delilah where no one else can reach me. I burn it instead to keep it away from her. The spiders are crawling down my throat. I need to do something. I need to summon something, but it’s so hard to concentrate. I manage a single imp through the pain and detonate it. The swarm is set on fire, but it’s still eating me. There are too many of them. I try to scream, but there are spiders in my lungs. I collapse beneath their weight. The pain goes away immediately, which is nice. Every sensation is gone at once, which makes sense; I don’t have a body anymore. I’m dead. Being dead is strange. I’m a little cold, but it’s a relieving cold, like a cold shower after a hot day. The world around me is gray upon gray upon gray, all blobs of meaningless nothing, some of them moving. I could make out detail if I focused, maybe, but it’s hard to care enough to try. It doesn’t matter. I’m dead. There are two cords coming out of my back, although I don’t have a back. They’re tethering me to something, but they can’t reach wherever they’re meant to connect, so the ends are cut and frayed. I feel a very distant sense of safety, shelter, and a place to rest, but it’s like noise through water, muffled and distorted. There’s a barrier in the way. I’m being pulled somewhere, but I’m not going anywhere, because there’s nowhere to go. So I just… drift. Formless. Uncaring. Dead. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. The King in Yellow laughs. She is color in the gray. “Well, that was quick. I suppose I’m to blame, aren’t I? No matter. You’ll gain enough focus to reincarnate without a safe haven eventually, but the fight will be long over by then. You’ll have missed the climax! That won’t do. Not to worry, my dear, your good pal Hastur will make things right. Ah, but, in return, would you do me one small little favor? When you get back to your world after all this is over, I’d like you to pick the right time to tell your darling Sophia how you feel about her. All important conversations deserve the right location, ambience, and planning—for a love confession, I recommend a holiday. Doesn’t that sound nice?” I don’t respond. I can hear what she’s saying, but it doesn’t mean anything to a dead girl. The King laughs again. “Of course, your head’s a little too muddled right now to make any kind of binding agreement. Don’t worry, I won’t take advantage and force it on you; a deal under duress means less than nothing. All I ask is that you remember my advice. Spare a thought for ol’ Hastur. Good luck, Rachel.” She snaps her fingers and I’m alive again. Pain, heat, the ground beneath me, the air around me. Life pumping through my veins. The world is sharp color and bright, bright, bright. A metal hand grabs my wrist and pulls me behind an energy shield before Delilah’s swarm can devour me again. “Archon!” Ferromancer shouts in my ear, snapping me out of my resurrection fugue. “What happened?” Ferromancer and Agatha have layered their barriers again. The magical girl is flagging, the exhaustion written on her face as she chants spell after spell, while Ferromancer’s suit seems more dimly lit than before. The spiders surround us, but the outermost layer of our shield incinerates any that try to get through it. There are so, so, so many spiders. This has to be an effect of the gift that Mars gave her; Delilah never exceeded her own body mass when she went swarm mode back in the city, but now the entire theater is blanketed in bugs. Delilah’s main body is still fighting in the heart of the swarm, those corrosive knives cutting through clone after clone of Harlequin. Dozens of clown bodies dissolve into the ceaseless, skittering mass. I don’t see any of Ferromancer’s drones. I don’t see Howl, either. “Device took me back to Forks,” I force out. “Olympic Mountains. Then here when I used it again. Dying sucked. The King did something—accelerated my reincarnation. Where’s Howl?” “Gone. Vanished in the swarm, but I don’t think she was eaten.” There’s a twinge of anger audible through Ferromancer’s mechanically distorted voice. “We’re at a stalemate with Delilah; at current expenditure I can keep her out indefinitely, but nothing we’ve tried has seriously damaged her. She’s outpacing Harlequin in terms of regenerative capability.” Which is absurd. “There must be a bypass condition,” I muse, “though I would have guessed fire and that certainly hasn’t worked. She’s been boosted to another level, but even Catastrophes can be beaten.” “By teams that are much bigger and more prepared than ours,” Ferromancer says. “I left my briefcase behind to maintain the machinery in the outpost and establish a communication channel back to the Morrigan. I wasn’t expecting the King in fucking Yellow to show up.” I glance at Agatha. “Can you use your power to find a weak spot?” She shakes her head and breaks off an incantation. “Tried. Still too much information; I can’t even start sifting through it without getting sick.” I grimace and start wracking my brains for a solution. Normally I’d have a bunch of experience wargaming a witch’s abilities, but I didn’t know Delilah existed until that day in the workshop; I’ve never seen a model of her powers to start theorycrafting against. I went looking, of course, but I had almost nothing to go on, so nothing is what I found. Ferromancer comes up with a plan first: “Archon, let’s repeat the trick that won our fight with the eye. If we apply the full sum of your flame to the right weapon, it might be enough. I have a handful of gadgets left we could try, though none as impressive as the railgun.” “Actually,” Agatha says softly, “I have an idea.” She holds up her spellbook. “My grimoire is integral to my ultimate spell, so transforming it should amplify the effect. I can’t imagine us finding anything stronger than that, at least on short notice. Although I’d feel bad about hitting Harlequin with it, too, since I can’t discriminate targets very easily.” “They’ll be fine,” Ferromancer says. The clown witch hasn’t slowed down at all in their brawl with Delilah, building more bodies as fast as they’re destroyed. “One death won’t hurt.” “The same is true of our opponent,” I point out, eyeing the spider swarm nervously. “That won’t be a problem.” There’s an icy calm to Ferromancer’s voice. “We just need to weaken Delilah enough that I can land the killing blow and finish our round of three.” I stare at my teacher in shock. They’ve killed each other before? And you still invited her to your workshop!? And she came!?!? I have never been more curious about the nature of their relationship, but now really isn’t the time to press. I narrow my eyes at her, but say, “Okay. I’ll start pouring flame.” Agatha carefully holds out her spellbook and flips to the right page. “It’s fine,” she mutters to herself, “it’ll be fine, it’s not real fire, we are not burning a book, this is just more magic. This is fine.” She starts chanting in a low, even rhythm. I call forth the green flame of transformation and direct it at Agatha’s book, willing Prometheus to empower the item as much as possible. All that I have to give. This has to work. In the midst of her melee with Harlequin, Delilah suddenly stops. The swarm shifts, more of its mass coalescing around the center to bury Harlequin’s clones, and then the human core drifts over to us and comes to a stop just in front of the layered barrier. “Do you really think that’ll work?” she taunts us. She looks monstrous now, body constantly sloughing off spiders, her mask fused to her face and tearing as she talks. “Go ahead, give it your best shot. I have power now, real power. You can’t possibly compare. All of you are nothing to me. You’ll all be swept away in the new order—an age of gods and monsters is upon us! My sisters in the Syndicate will see the light when I come bearing gifts from the divine. We shall become the masters of the world. Not even that damned Strix Striga will be able to stop us.” Ferromancer folds her arms. “You used to be smarter than this, Delilah.” There’s accusation in her tone, but also a keen edge of disappointment. “Mars is using you, can’t you see that?” Delilah barks a laugh. “Obviously. And I’m using him. That’s how the game works. You taught me that lesson, old friend. I’ve never forgotten it.” Ferromancer is quiet for a moment. My body grows cold as I empty my furnace into Agatha’s weapon. “I could say I was a different person back then, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m not the one trading freedom for power.” “Power is freedom,” Delilah hisses. “It’s the only way to be free!” I push the last of my flame into the book and slump. Agatha finishes chanting. Through the numbing fog, I hear the words of her ultimate spell: “With clear eyes, I see the path before me. Henceforth, I shall suffer no sacrifice. THREADS OF DESTINY!” Agatha’s spellbook, which had begun to glow brighter and brighter, shining with my power and hers, explodes into scattered pages that unravel into thread as they fall. Multicolored string fills the theater, twists through the air, and latches on to every single spider in the room. There is a piece of thread for each of them, and plenty more for Delilah’s human form. Everything in the theater that could be described as Delilah is tagged by shimmering string. Then the string vanishes, replaced by countless swords of white light that appear midair and fling themselves into all the points where Agatha’s thread touched something alive. Delilah is impaled by dozens, her spiders by thousands, and she screams. For a brief moment, there is no space outside our little bubble of safety that is not a glowing sword. The light melts away as quickly as it came. My power returns to me with another bolt of searing agony, while next to me it’s Agatha’s turn to slump, spent and exhausted. Her contributions to the shield wall dissipate, her magic leaving her as the price of her ultimate spell. The swarm is gone. Delilah’s spiders have been scoured from the theater. The witch herself is barely standing, her form half-melted and full of holes… but only for a moment. Delilah glows red, suffused once again by the light of Mars, and her wounds vanish. She regains her shape and a fresh batch of spiders crawls out of her to surround Ferromancer’s barrier. “Fools,” she cackles. “You can’t—” The witch suddenly jerks to the side, speech cutting off as she twists her body away just in time to avoid being impaled by a silver spear. She raises both daggers in a defensive stance, body rigid, hands shaking. Even though I can’t see her face, I can tell she’s terrified. The spear, surrounded by a pale glow, levitates back to the hand of the woman who threw it. Strix Striga smiles.