 
Memesis

Jon Jacks

Other New Adult and Children's books by Jon Jacks

The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)

The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll's Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666

P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque

Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent

Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak

Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife

Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland

The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas

Text copyright© 2016 Jon Jacks

All rights reserved

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Thank you for downloading this ebook. It remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Thank you for your support.

# Chapter 1

'It's said that she will come when you least expect her.'

As she spoke, the girl's eyelids were closed yet flickering rapidly, as if she were accessing other levels, other worlds.

'She will come out of the sun, it will seem. And afterwards it will be sworn that she did, for how else could she wreak such havoc?'

The men casually seated on the ground about her laughed.

One leapt to his feet, kicking the crouching girl so hard on the shoulder that she was sent sprawling into the dust, her head almost falling into the edges of the fire.

'Now aint _you_ the pretty little thing,' he sneered irately, 'coming over all shaman like in the hope it scares us!'

'It's said that all this, this apocalypse of man,' the girl continued, forcing herself to rise back up onto her knees despite the pain and awkwardness of tightly bound wrists and ankles, 'has all been brought about not by a war, as some presume, but by one single girl.'

The men all harshly chuckled again, one throwing his dregs of poteen into the fire and grimacing with delight as the flare up threatened to set the girl's ridiculously long hair alight.

'I've heard of this girl: Nemesis,' one of the men declared, a touch of wariness intruding into his tone.

' _Mem_ esis,' the girl corrected him, 'for her lethality increases with every telling.'

There was a frightened whimpering from the darkness lying beyond the campfire's dim circle of light.

No one paid any attention to it, least of all the bound girl.

It was the whining of an even younger girl, one too young to provide the men with any evening sport. She was tightly bound too, of course, for some men would still pay a good price for even the youngest of girls.

The only question on the men's minds was how much fun they could have with this slightly older girl without affecting the sale price too much.

' _I've_ also heard of this girl,' one of the men announced with a disbelieving smirk. 'A destroyer of cities: but called _Afro-deity_ , from what _I_ hear.'

The girl nodded in agreement.

'She goes by many names, depending on the mood that takes her.'

'Wiping out whole legions of armed men, as I've heard it,' another man grimly chuckled. 'Fairy stories!'

'She is less forgiving of those who – as foolishly as Ahab's pursuit of his own end – deliberately hunt her down, flattering themselves they will survive their encounter.'

Yet another man irately rose to his feet, this time to scornfully spit a mouthful of poteen directly into the girl's face.

'Me, I don't believe a _word_ of all this bull, about this girl who makes a H-bomb seem all cuddly and caring!' he snapped furiously.

'Wiser men _don't_ believe,' the girl said, undeterred. 'Not that they are wiser because they know the truth; but because their disbelief prevents them from seeking out an early death.'

'And _you_?' the man snarled, grabbing her hair, violently pulling her head back, her face up. 'Do _you_ know where we can find this girl? Is she out there now, in the darkness, preparing to save you? Is _that_ what you're hoping?'

He peered out mockingly into the surrounding darkness. The little girl whimpered in terror as his wandering eyes briefly, tauntingly latched onto hers.

'She's here,' the girl kneeling by the fire insisted, 'she might yet spare you–'

The man grabbed her so fiercely by the jaw that she found it difficult to continue.

– 'if you answer her question.'

'Question?' the man snorted. 'What question might _that_ be?'

'Naseby; do you know where I might find a place called Naseby?'

'Naseby?'

He glanced back and around at the other men, exchanging puzzled looks and guffaws.

'There's no such place,' one of the men confidently declared. 'And if there ever had been, it wouldn't be standing now.'

'That's a shame, that you couldn't help me,' the girl said sadly.

'A shame?' The man had at last released the girl's aching jaw, but he still maliciously glared down at her. 'Why woul–'

*

The girl kicked out the last remnants of the fire.

She didn't want any of the surrounding animals to be scared off by the flames. She was relying on them to dispose of the bodies.

Man might deserve to starve, to suffer; but the animals were guiltless; and so the girl took delight in providing them with a feast of fresh flesh.

She had already made a quick search of the men's belongings, including the saddlebags on the scrawny horse they'd somehow managed to acquire. There was nothing of use to her.

Of course, she had destroyed their weapons. She didn't want them falling into the hands of any other men.

'What about me?'

The little girl hobbled out of the darkness into the last of the fire's quickly dimming glow. She had managed to loosen the ropes binding her ankles enough to allow a modicum of movement.

The older girl stared back at the little girl in surprise.

'I thought you were dead,' she said bluntly.

She didn't add, 'You were _supposed_ to be dead.'

The little girl pleading held up her bound hands.

'I can't survive out here; not with my hands tied.'

The other girl glanced about herself at the surrounding, forbidding land with pursed lips.

'Hands tied or untied: you won't survive out here anyway,' she pointed out.

'Not if you leave me here,' the little girl agreed.

'You saw what happened here?' the other asked in surprise, indicating the men's shattered bodies with nothing more than a disparaging glance. 'And yet you still want to come with me?'

The little girl nodded.

'I'll be safe with you: if you don't kill me too.'

The older girl chuckled lightly.

It did seem – well, a _shame_ to kill the poor little mite.

'Do _you_ know where Naseby is?' she asked.

The younger girl shook her head.

*

'What should I call you?'

The little girl was holding firmly on to the waist of the older one, her only way of ensuring she wouldn't fall off the back of the horse.

The other girl sighed regretfully, as she had when she had relented and agreed that the little girl could accompany her until they reached an area where foraging might be easier.

She wasn't supposed to show mercy. It was a worrying precedent.

Had she been living amongst these people too long, too closely?

'Call me whatever you want.'

'I heard you say you go by many names,' the little girl said, 'but which do you prefer?'

'You heard too much.'

'I always wanted an older sister,' the little girl persisted, undeterred. 'I'll call you Sis.'

For the first time in what had been an exceptionally long life, Sis laughed and shook her head in disbelief.

*

# Chapter 2

Even Sis frowned in puzzlement as, coming out upon a high outcrop of rock, they found themselves looking down on the most curious fight either of them and ever seen (and they had both seen a great many fights, not one of which could be described as fair or straightforward).

This fight, however, was unusual because it was impossible to determine whether it involved two men or two animals.

One could have been a hybrid of a lion, the other of some bird-like creature, possibly a further cross between an eagle and a vulture. Identifying exactly where human became animal was impossible, their dress and armour being a complicated mix of skins and furs, while other pelts appeared to hang loosely from their waists.

The weapons they used were crude, constructed as so many were these days from metal scavenged from the rusting car wrecks that could only be uncovered after a few days' diligent digging beneath the all-conquering undergrowth. Yet the weapons were wielded fearsomely, expertly, neither of the beasts giving quarter, each striking out viciously in the hope of landing the killing blow.

'What _are_ they?'

The little girl had to partially peer over Sis's shoulder to get a clear view of the entirety of the fight that – due to the speed, strength and agility of the combatants – could suddenly move from one of close confinement to one spread out over a relatively wide area.

'I'm not sure,' Sis admitted. 'I've never come across anything quite like this myself.'

The lion-man glanced up towards them, sensing their presence, catching the scent of the horse and the little girl on the wind.

Seeing that the lion-man had been distracted, the bird-man rushed forwards, his spear levelled for the heart revealed by a slightly lowered shield.

The lion-man abruptly brought his shield up, knocking the spear point aside. The momentum of the bird-man's charge uncontrollably carried him forwards, his own weight thrusting him deeply upon the suddenly raised blade of the lion-man's sword.

The lion-man brutally jerked the blade up, cutting deeper into the bird-man's flesh, tearing at and releasing the innards from their tightly ordered confinement.

Clever, thought Sis: he'd only feigned distraction.

The merciless intelligence of a man, working in combination with the heightened senses and instincts of an animal.

The question was: did that mean these creatures had become a part of her task?

*

As the lion-man used his blade once more to deftly remove a long shred of feathered skin from his dying victim, he also glanced up towards Sis and the little girl again, his triumphant grin a touch gloating; he had, after all, conscripted them into helping him defeat his foe.

With a hard, practised tightening of her legs, Sis urged her haggard mount into a fast trot along the outcrop, searching for a way down towards the lower plain where the battle had taken place.

The lion-man grinned again, this time with a mix of bewilderment and amusement that these young girls were foolishly daring to draw closer. Sheathing his sword, slipping his shield onto his back, and securing the fresh, still bloody pelt in a loop hanging from the belt around his waist, he spun around and headed off in the opposite direction, unrushed yet still powerfully fast.

The bird-man had already been dead for a few minutes by the time Sis drew her horse up alongside him. Even so, she leapt down from out of her saddle, causally inspecting him, particularly around the area where the lion-man had mercilessly taken a slice of skin.

Without the need for any kind of knife, she used her fingers to softly and expertly carve into other parts of the man, pulling back flesh and muscle so that she could make a close study of it all; rubbing it between her fingers, smelling it, even tasting it.

'Grafted: parts of the animal – a live animal, too, I would suspect – have been grafted onto this man long ago, probably when he was even younger than you, Lil.'

Sis glanced up at the young girl, who had remained seated on the horse.

The young girl had chosen her own name, having no clear memory of her parents (although she believed they might have been killed many years ago, doubtlessly in a fight over food with people who had their own ideas about sharing) other than that she believed they had called her Lily. The shortened version also carried a sense, she had declared happily, of Little Sister.

Sis hadn't liked that at all, but apart from that couldn't see any other reason to argue against it.

Lil watched Sis's butchering of the hybrid man distastefully, but couldn't see any other reason to argue against it.

In this world, it was knowledge of whom you were up against that could ultimately save you.

So he grew up as part animal?'

Sis nodded in reply as she continued with her considered examination of the increasingly finely shredded man.

'It shouldn't work, of course; maybe they start off with an awful lot of children, knowing most of them aren't going to survive.'

'I've seen people do worse,' Lil replied bluntly. 'And it isn't the survival of the kids that's uppermost in their minds.'

'The work of the Devil.'

'The work of men, Sis.'

'If you're right, Lil, then there's no saving them.'

She looked down at the cut flesh of the man.

'I'd almost forgotten,' Sis said, suddenly crouching down by the man and levering away a larger chunk of the raw flesh, 'you'll be getting hungry, Lil.'

Lil was aghast.

'Sis, no! We can't eat _him_!'

Sis frowned in bewilderment.

'I've seen many men eat other men.'

'Not _everyone_ , Sis: _most_ people _don't_ eat other men!'

Her eyes were wide with horror: is this how Sis had managed to survive, by resorting to cannibalism?

Sis read the meaning lying behind Lil's disgusted gawp.

'Me?' She chuckled grimly, casually tossing the chunk of flesh closer towards a pair of eagerly waiting rodents. 'No, of course not, Lil: _I_ don't need to _eat_.'

*

# Chapter 3

For a while, they followed the tracks of the lion-man.

Even when the marks he'd made were no longer apparent to Lil, Sis continued on as if she still remained unerringly aware of where he had headed.

It was only when they came across the furrows left by some form of wooden cart that Sis turned off from following the lion man, choosing to see instead where these tracks led.

Obviously, the men who had passed this way had made attempts to cover up the tracks they'd left, yet the strokes of the brushes they'd used to obliterate the furrows were themselves an unnatural feature in this otherwise untouched landscape.

'Are you intending to get rid of me: to leave me with them?' Lil asked concernedly. 'You can never be sure what the people you meet are going to be like!'

'Oh, I think you can,' Sis disagreed coolly, 'as long as you assume they will always be bad: always tainted by the Devil.'

*

It was the nearest thing to what passed for a town these days.

A group of like-minded people, gathering together to form a workable farm, with shrivelled crops growing, with wizened animals being herded: and, naturally, with a fort put together from a mix of wood and cannibalised steel, a reasonably well-stocked building into which everyone could retreat and defend themselves whenever they came under attack from any marauding band.

It was structure whose defences had been cleverly reinforced with a surrounding of a thickly thorned climber, such that it seemed to naturally blend into the landscape.

The forts and farms that most travellers came across were already burnt into the ground, the crops rotting in their shallow furrows, the animal carcases left for the carrion once they'd been stripped of anything edible.

The sight of two girls drawing close on a starving horse only made the farmers wary as opposed to terrified. The ones closest to the oncoming girls gathered around them, their farm implements raised in readiness to be used as weapons; but most of the men, women and children remained toiling at the soil.

Lil was relieved that more of the farmers hadn't surrounded them: that would have been a sign that they were about to be taken prisoner, young girls being a precious commodity in any trading deal that had to be made.

Still, she was also surprised that this community was so innocent that they didn't treat every newcomer as a possible threat: just how wrong could they be about Sis, who could probably obliterate this whole farm without breaking a fingernail?

'Sorry girls: we've only got enough food for our–'

'Do you know where Naseby is?' Sis demanded, cutting off the man's apology.

*

'No, Sis!'

'No?'

Sis was surprised by Lil's intervention. Her hair, which had briefly, innocently risen and curled as if in a breeze, a breeze that wasn't really there, loosely fell around her shoulders and down her back once more.

The handful of farmers barring their way were even more confused.

'Naseby?' one of them repeated unsurely.

'Leave them,' Lil hissed quietly. 'These are _good_ people.'

Sis briefly studied the men standing before them, the women working the fields, the children tiredly helping remove stones.

She nodded in agreement.

Neither she nor Lil had bothered listening closely to the men's protestations that the girls couldn't stay, that food was scarce.

A woman who had been tending the crops a little farther off had left off from her work to approach the group.

'They're young, just girls; we can't let them go on.'

'We can, Vi: if we don't, whose children would you like to see starve in their stead?'

The woman appeared grimly torn by the unfairness of the situation.

'It's best we move on,' Lil said, helping this poor, well-meaning woman out of the dilemma she'd put herself in. 'We were just passing through.'

Lil didn't want Sis staying any longer here in case she changed her mind about sparing these people.

'Then take this,' the woman insisted, stepping forward and offering them the small sack of food she'd prepared to sustain herself as she worked in the fields.

Lil briefly touched the sack, smiled: and with just as much insistence forced the woman to take her food back.

'Thank you,' Lil said, 'neither of us need it: you've given me more than enough to keep me going.'

Sis gave Lil a brief, puzzled frown. Then, rising in her saddle, Sis once again addressed everyone in a loud, demanding voice.

'Does anyone know where _Edgehill_ is?'

'Sis!' Lil snorted disapprovingly. 'Leav–'

'Yes!' a young boy working on a nearby furrow cried out excitedly, interrupting Lil's admonishment.

'Yes,' he insisted again as he stepped closer, grinning elatedly. ' _I_ know where Edgehill is.'

*

# Chapter 4

Naturally, no one trusted the girls enough to allow them to head off with no one but the boy to show them the way.

A distrustingly sour-faced man accompanied him, both of them riding a horse whose poor condition rivalled that of Sis and Lil's mount.

'What was all that about?' Sis hissed quietly back at Lil once they'd dropped far enough behind to be sure they wouldn't be overheard.

Sis didn't look over her shoulder at Lil as they rode on. But Lil had a good idea what Sis meant by her question.

Even so, Lil didn't answer immediately, preferring to let Sis explain herself a little more.

'All this, we don't need any food thing! _I_ don't eat: but _you_ were hungry.'

'Was I?'

'That's what you said: back when I was cutting up that bird-man.'

'Nope: that's what you _presumed_. And I appreciated that kind thought – if not the lunch you were thinking of dishing out to me.'

'You heard the man; food's scarce out here.'

'Not out here – _everywhere_.'

'So, hence my question; why turn down an offer of food?'

'It was hers. She needed it more than I did.'

'Very admirable: but you do realise you can't live very long on self-righteousness?'

'And you? Letting them live; wasn't that your own wonderful act of self-righteousness?'

As she was still clutching onto Sis's waist to ensure she didn't fall from the horse, Lil felt the slight tremors of a silent laugh running through the older girl's body.

'What _are_ you doing to me, Lil?'

'You can't go around just killing _everybody_!'

'It's not _killing_ : it's judgement – a _cleansing_! Besides, I spared _you_ : and that was before I had you latched onto my back, flattering yourself you're my conscience.'

'I'm different.'

Sis paused, thinking about this.

'Yes, you _are_ ,' she said, adding broodily, 'and if I hadn't _sensed_ that, I'd never have let myself be captured, would I now?'

*

What had survived of the severely battered road sign was in surprisingly clear view; this being one of those areas where a large group of people had once dug reasonably deeply into the accumulated soil and undergrowth, hoping to find beneath it all the buried treasures of the earlier Golden Age.

Edgewood.

Not quite the same, Sis thought.

Then again, she reassured herself, glancing around at the surrounding landscape; who's to say a hill hadn't later been overgrown by a wood? Where _hadn't_ that happened?

'You can read?' Sis asked the boy with a mix of curiosity and admiration.

Both the boy and the sullen man rewarded her with perplexed grimaces.

'Read? What is there to read anymore anyway?' the man asked irritably.

'But the sign...' Sis persisted. 'How would he know this said Edgewood?'

'I didn't,' the boy admitted, staring at the sign as if it was only now that its importance had dawned on him. 'I...I just had this strange feeling that this is what your were searching for.'

Sis frowned, unsure whether she should believe the boy or not: there was absolutely no reason to accept that he had merely _sensed_ that this was the right area.

Still...he _had_ led her here.

She had already dismounted to pull aside the strands of ivy and weeds that had begun to reclaim the area once again. Now she effortlessly dug down a little into the hard-packed soil with a bare hand and, bringing it clear as a clenched fist, opened her palm up before he surprised boy to present him with a small collection of healthy looking seeds.

'For your fields,' she said. 'For stronger crops.'

Although the boy took them gratefully, almost excitably, the man with him frowned in disappointment.

'We have plenty of seeds,' he sneered dismissively

'Not like these,' Sis assured him.

With a deft twist of her fingers, she revealed that she still held one of the seeds in her hand. She casually tossed it to one side, off towards a patch of long, wild grass relatively clear of the thicker, strangling undergrowth.

As if had been abruptly transformed into an insect on its short journey through the air, the seed burrowed down into the soil.

And where it had fallen, a tall, golden reed of wheat sprouted immediately into life.

*

# Chapter 5

When the man and the boy left, the man was no longer sour faced. He was beaming, clutching the small purse he'd poured the seeds into as if it were the most precious gift from heaven.

Naturally, the man had been astounded when he'd witnessed the phenomenal growth, the sturdiness of the wheat produced.

Most amazing of all, of course, was the complete dethroning of the rule of the growing seasons.

'But how...?'

He had stared at the wheat wide-eyed, his reasoning mind screaming at him that it had to be some cheap conjuring trick. But the boy, with a nod of approval from Sis, had happily stepped forward to strip off and take down a succulent ear, one which he had joyously presented to the disbelieving man.

'Only the very first seeds will grow _this_ quickly,' Sis had confessed without a hint of apology. 'But the seeds from those will still grow quicker and stronger than anything else you presently have. Use them wisely: don't eat the first crop of seeds, no matter the temptation.'

Sis sensed that Lil was now staring at her oddly.

'What?' she asked.

'A moment ago you were going to kill them all,' Lil chuckled in reply. 'Now you send them off with magic beans: magic beans that will ensure they continue to live.'

*

'What is this Naseby?' Lil asked. 'Why is it so important that you find it?'

'Once I find it, my task – I'm sure – will be almost complete.'

'Your _task_? To kill everyone you meet?'

'If I find this Naseby, then I hope I can spare whoever's still alive.'

'As the men said, there aren't really any places left that are big enough to be given names anymore.'

'What they _used_ to be called is good enough for me: and then I'll meet _him_ there.'

'Him? The Devil?'

Sis grinned with admiration at the little girl.

'I couldn't fail to notice you kept bringing his name up,' Lil explained.

'Maybe you notice _too_ much,' Sis stated grimly.

She reached into the inner pocket of her heavily weathered jacket, producing the remnants of an even more battered book. She handed it carefully to Lil.

'I found this a few months back: hundreds of years ago, it says, there was a battle, where the Devil was defeated.'

Lil reverently held the book in her hands, turning the fragile pages with as much care as she'd use holding the delicate wings of an injured fledgling.

She had never seen a book before. Most had been burnt long ago, when men's only need was to keep warm.

Naturally, she had never learnt to read.

'John Milton,' she said assuredly. ' _Areopagitica._ '

'You can read?'

Sis's eyebrows rose in surprise.

'Well, I didn't know I could until you gave this book to me. I can see that it's nowhere near being the full book: just a few pages left of what's called the forward. There's nothing of the poem itself.'

Lil turned the slim remnants of the book in her hands.

'He wrote another, more famous poem it says: _Paradise Lost_. About the Devil.'

She glanced up at Sis once more, as if beginning to understand her obsession with this Devil.

'It mentions this Naseby here too: a victory for the Parliamentary forces. A defeat for the king.'

'The Devil had sided with the king.'

She briefly paused before reciting a remembered passage as if it were the most delicious of poems.

'Who rules the Kingdom? The King.

Who rules the King? The Duke.

Who the Duke? The Devil!'

'Ah, yes, yes: here it is,' Lil said, still holding the book, still finding no need to flick through its few remaining pages. 'A popular saying referring to the Duke of Buckingham: and, yes, there's more too – "If the King does not apparently fight for Antichrist, yet tis most apparent that Antichrist does fight for the King." _The Oath of Pacification_ , by Henry Parker.'

Sis nodded, impressed by Lil's remarkable and unexpected ability to somehow detect the important points in a text without having to reading it in the normal way.

This little girl was proving to be different to all the others in so many ways: was their hope for man after all?

'"If the Earl of Essex does not apparently fight for Christ,"' Lil read on, '"yet it seems very probable that Christ fights for him, for our great Armies within the circle of this last year have four times met, and still the King's side hath gone off with loss and disadvantage."'

'I've recently come across many of the places mentioned in there,' Sis explained. 'Places were other battles against the Devil had been fought.'

'Come across them?' Lil frowned curiously.

'If you dig deep into the undergrowth that's taken over everything, you can find signs.'

Lil found it hard to believe that even someone like Sis would have the ability to retrieve so many of the signs of the ancient towns rumoured to lie buried beneath the soil and trees.

She calmly read a little more of the book.

'"The town of Reading being begirt with his Excellency's forces, all his Majesty's power could not relieve it; yet Gloucester being begirt by his Majesty's forces, his Excellency found means to relieve it. And as for Edge-hill and Newbury, though neither side was totally routed, yet the mastery of the field was left to his Excellency, "' Lil said, reading once again without having to turn to the relevant pages.

'I came down through Newbury, Gloucester, and Manchester on the coast, gradually leading me onto Reading; and now, at last, here – Edgehill.'

Lil gave a nod of understanding, having unerringly found the references to other battles, other names.

'And this place,' she said, casting an observant eye about her, extending her arms to indicate she was referring to the general area, 'the name of this _whole_ place isn't mentioned in here: Lexington.'

She had been seated on the grass, yet now rose to her feet, looking out over the dense woodland with a glazed stare, as if seeing there something entirely different.

'And yet there was also a famous battle here, one fought by the descendants of the men mentioned: fighting each other once again, over a hundred years later.'

Sis followed the little girl's gaze, sensing that Lil was aware of a past that she herself couldn't see.

'If it was a battle from a different period, it wouldn't be mentioned in the book,' Sis pointed out. 'Besides,' she added, pointing to the sign, 'are you sure you're not confused, that you're not seeing this battle? How can you be sure to within a small matter of a hundred years?'

Lil frowned: she had to agree she couldn't be sure of the actual date of the battle.

'Yes, it is confusing; there are so many frightened, bewildered voices to listen to.'

She looked out over the scene once more.

'And yes...it _was_ a fight against the king's forces: does that mean the Devil wasn't _completely_ defeated after all, if it _did_ take place later, a hundred years later?'

Sis grimaced determinedly.

'That's what _I_ believe: but if _I_ defeat this Devil, then men's minds might be purified once more.'

She rose to her own feet, striding over towards the peacefully grazing horse.

'Only _then_ can I spare them.'

*

# Chapter 6

As Sis prepared to mount up on the wizened horse once more, Lil gave her a disparaging glare.

'What _now_?' an exasperated Sis exclaimed.

'Why are you letting the horse suffer in this way?' Lil asked.

'You can't read me the way you "read" that book, can you?' Sis demanded suspiciously, glaring back at Lil

Lil shook her head.

'Course not: _you're_ different.'

'So are _you_ ,' Sis snapped a little irately. 'What _makes_ you so different?'

Lil shrugged.

'The same thing that makes you different?'

Sis guffawed.

'I _don't_ think so.'

' _I_ think so.'

'You've got _that_ wrong girl; trust me.'

'Maybe: maybe not.'

'Can't you be told _anything_?'

'Maybe: maybe not.'

'Maybe, you know, I _shouldn't_ have spared you?'

'Maybe you need me: such as you need me pointing out that you should help this poor horse.'

Sis stared at the horse, her expression one of puzzlement.

'He's like _this_ because of the treatment he received before I even came across him. I let him rest, eat, drink: what _else_ am I supposed to do?'

'So?'

Lil pouted in dissatisfaction at Sis's reply.

'So?'

Sis gave Lil a hard, quizzical look, demanding more of an explanation from her.

'So, as I'm beginning to get a good idea of what you're capable of, what's the point of letting this poor animal continue to suffer just so you can flatter yourself your not revealing anything to me?'

Sis shrugged resignedly as she took in the horse's poor condition.

'You _sure_ you can't read me?' She glared back at Lil once more. 'You wouldn't be _lying_ to me now?'

Lil shook her head.

'I just seem to sense things in areas where a lot of people have felt similar emotions; that's all that happened with the book – all those people reading the same passages.'

Sis nodded, as if she were beginning to understand.

'Ah, so _that's_ all that happened,' she chuckled sarcastically.

Rather than mounting up, she moved around to the horse's front, taking its long, sunken head in her hands.

She whispered to him lovingly.

Kissed him lightly on the white star gracing his forehead.

From her hands, from the breath of her kiss, there was a moving out of a rippling energy, a quivering of air slipping beneath the horse's skin. The flesh flowed fluidly, waves rushing throughout the horse's body, bulking up muscles, strengthening the previously weakened bones lying underneath.

The horse took its remarkable transformation calmly.

'Satisfied, madam?' Sis asked, turning back to Lil with a mischievous smirk.

*

They hadn't travelled far before they started to encounter the tall, oddly slender hills that signified a major city had once stood here; one whose buildings hadn't completely collapsed, yet had still eventually succumbed to nature's more invasive plants.

They passed between the relatively orderly lines of these hills, travelling along what once had been a wide road, itself littered with its own mounds of what could be buried metallic carts and piles of rubble.

Areas such as this were amongst the most dangerous, the ones travellers tended to avoid, for any number of underground car parks and cellars could have remained reasonably unscathed, providing shelters for groups of people who didn't mind living in the darkness as long as there were enough smaller animals around to hunt down and live off.

They didn't mind hunting down, either, the odd unwary traveller. Especially ones foolish enough to ride in amongst them riding a magnificent thoroughbred horse.

Lil could hear the clatter of disturbed rocks coming from amongst the surrounding hillocks. Wolves, bears, maybe even lions: any of the wild creatures prowling the land could have caused it. But naturally, it might also signal the presence of the most frightening of them all; men so confident in their superiority that they didn't even bother attempting to hide their arrival.

Going by what Lil had witnessed when Sis had so effortlessly taken out the men who had captured them, there shouldn't really be much of a contest here either if they were attacked. But maybe even Sis could be overwhelmed by a sudden, concerted attack by a vast force of men, which they could well end up facing in a ruined city like this.

When you need neither food nor drink, you don't really need to stop travelling.

The horse they were riding, however, needed both, as well as a rest.

They stopped by a narrow stream, one that had long ago become naturally cleansed of the detritus men had once unthinkingly filled it with.

Winchester: that's what this place used to be called.

'This used to be called Winchester: that was briefly mentioned in the book,' she said coolly to Sis's back.

Lil felt Sis give a nod of appreciation for the information.

'Your parents: who were they, Lil?' Sis asked with all the casualness of someone who hadn't heard anything unusual.

'Hard to remember much about them; they loved me, I suppose. But they also saw me, I reckon, as another mouth to feed, another problem holding them back from ensuring their own safety.'

'This Christ – the one mentioned in the book, who was also against the Devil – do you think, maybe, he sent you to help me?'

'Help you? In what way?'

'The way you can sense what a place used to be called.'

'Hmn, not always; there can be lot of conflicting voices I hear. It's only when I sense some thought bringing them all together than I can read it all clearly. With the boy–'

'So that was you too?'

Sis glanced her way, more impressed than ever.

'Not completely,' Lil admitted. 'I'm not sure how it worked – not even sure what _did_ work! I just sensed that something gelled between what you were asking for and what he'd seen; something he hadn't really even registered clearly himself.'

Lil shrugged off Sis's questioning gaze, a gaze demanding explanations Lil felt incapable of giving.

'The Lexington battle thing – it all just gelled with what I sensed coming through from all those who had read the book; thoughts about people who had previously been close suddenly brutally fighting each other.'

'The good against the bad; inevitable.'

Lil paused thoughtfully before replying, 'I don't think it all comes down to anything so simple.'

'The Devil on one side; this Christ on the other,' Sis persisted. 'It makes sense, then, why people suddenly start attacking each other.'

Lil's attempt at a reply died on her lips: her mouth agape, she reached forward, aiming to draw Sis's attention to the two men who had apparently sprouted from the undergrowth a few yards behind her.

'Men, fifteen of them, right?' Sis asked calmly without bothering to even briefly glance over her shoulder.

Lil was about to shake her head, to say no, there were two men; but then, one by one, more and more of the heavily camouflaged men began to appear from behind the hillocks and rocks.

'I'll take your word for it there are fifteen,' she said resignedly.

*

# Chapter 7

'I don't _think_ they mean us any harm,' Lil said, rising to her feet as the men began to confidently draw closer towards the two resting girls.

One took the reins of the grazing horse, grinning at his good fortune at acquiring such a remarkably healthy mount.

'Its not safe out here for two girls,' the nearest of the men declared loftily. He looked around, wary for any signs of other people, of an ambush. ' _Are_ you on your own?'

Sis had already coolly gained her feet.

'Do you know where Naseby is?' she asked him bluntly, ignoring his own question.

'Didn't you hear me?' he growled at her furiously, unaware that the grasses and leaves of his camouflage weren't moving anywhere near as wildly in the wind as the rising, whirling strands of the girl's hair. 'It's not safe here: you need to come with us!'

'So you don't know–'

'Sis...'

Responding to Lil's forbearing tone, Sis almost blithely turned towards her, the excitable hair strands left unchecked in their eager movement.

'Are _these_ good people?' she asked sceptically.

Seeing the way that a group of the men were admiring the horse, Lil was tempted to give an honest answer, a honest 'No'.

But did they deserve to die simply because they needed a healthy horse?

In all honesty again, no.

Instead, Lil decided that she would try to reason with the men.

'Could we have our horse back please?' she pleaded, stepping closer towards the horse, her hand raised as if expecting one of the men to place the reins in her hopefully outstretched palm.

'It's not safe for you to continue your journey,' one of the other men said.

'Around here, it's more dangerous than you might suppose,' another added, his tone as apparently concerned as the previous speaker.

'For two young girls, it's dangerous round here no matter what they do,' said a third, more sceptically, more resignedly.

It was his comment that was met with dour growls of agreement from the majority of the surrounding men.

'Are we safe with you?' Lil persisted

The man who had first spoken grinned wanly.

'Safer than with most people, I suppose,' he said with a low, gruff chuckle.

'Do most people pinch other people's horses?'

'If you've travelled anywhere, you must be aware they do,' the man replied bluntly. He looked back admiringly towards the increasingly skittish horse. 'It's a fine horse; a shame for such a creature to be wasted only on travelling.'

'And us?' Sis asked sourly. 'Is it a shame that two young girls are also wasted on travelling, do you think?'

Sis's long hair flowed and curled in the wind like a mass of disturbed serpents. Had anyone noticed, Lil wondered worriedly, that the hair was longer than it had been only moments ago?

Worse still, Lil caught the strange glimmers of light heralding the formation of the armour Sis seemed capable of instantly cladding herself within.

'Have you heard of Memesis?' Lil asked, hoping to give the man warning that he should alter his tone, his attitude.

The man looked at them both warily, still failing to spot the slight changes that had begun to take place to Sis's hair, the strange glints of emerald, of the brightest blue, appearing at certain points upon her body.

'Nemesis, you mean – or Astarte, as I've heard her called?' he said dismissively, despite a nervous chuckle, a swapping of edgy glowers with his nearest friends. 'Legends, that's all; stories to scare children. It's quite obviously impossible for a girl to create the mayhem described in these increasingly ridiculous tales!'

Lil anxiously glanced Sis's way, expecting the worst; but then, thankfully, the whirling hair calmed, while the glittering of green and blues faded, the first slivers of the sheets of armour readying to slip into place abruptly retreating once more.

'Who are these girls, Crafen?'

A group of women appeared out of the undergrowth, each as well camouflaged as the men already surrounding Sis and Lil. Naturally, Sis didn't seem at all surprised by their arrival: neither she was perturbed by their presence, Lil realised, which explained Sis's lowering of her defences.

The woman who had spoken seemed to be in charge of the new group, perhaps even of the whole team of men and women. She addressed the leader of the men as at least an equal.

'Don't they realise the danger they are in?' she continued, quickly glancing about herself, taking in the details of the scene.

'They don't trust us,' one of the men replied.

'If they think you mean to steal their horse,' the woman said, 'no wonder they don't trust you.'

The man she'd addressed as Crafen shrugged.

'We'd pay for it, if it came to that,' he said. 'But if they decide to join us, why wouldn't they let us make use of their horse anyway?'

Sis had politely remained quiet while the man and woman talked, Lil noticed with surprise, no doubt with the intention of forming a swift opinion of this new arrival.

Now she could no longer hold back from asking her question once more.

'Do you...'

'Sis...'

Sis ignored Lil's attempt to stop her.

...know where Naseby is?'

The woman briefly looked Sis up and down curiously, perhaps even irately, either shocked or impressed by Sis's forthrightness.

'Naseby?' she repeated bemusedly.

Although the word obviously meant nothing to her, Lil sensed once again, as she had with the boy earlier, that it somehow brought into life a brief spark of recognition deep within her, as if she were struggling to recall some long forgotten memory.

Bending down before the woman, Lil made a few deft strokes of her finger within the dust, scrawling out the symbols representing the word that she had seen within the book.

Even as she wrote out the letters, an excited murmuring began to rise in the throats of the watching men and women.

As Lil finished writing out the word, the woman glanced up from watching her, her eyes sparking with awe.

'Yes, yes,' she exclaimed excitedly, pointing down at the word in the dust as she spoke, ' _this_ appears upon our temple!'

*

# Chapter 8

It was another farm, but one much larger than the last one they had passed through, much larger than any farm Lil had come across before in fact.

It appeared to be incredibly well defended too, eschewing the single fort that farms normally relied on and placing their faith instead in a series of smaller structures that would obviously be dependent upon the supportive covering fire of arrows from any neighbouring fortress.

With such a large farm, of course, it would be almost impossible for anyone working in the outer fields to run for the safety of a large, single defensive construction positioned within its centre. This network of smaller structures was obviously their solution to a problem that had been the downfall of many farms, for any villagers caught by the marauders outside of the fort were invariably tortured, or at least left to starve in a no-man's land until the mortified defenders foolishly capitulated.

The buildings here were remarkably sturdy, formed of both well-cut wood and a rather surprising amount of salvaged remains of various Golden Age structures, including battered metal sheets and crumbling bricks. The men, women and children out working in the fields seemed to be unusually well-fed too. There was even laughter, especially amongst the children.

As they walked along the rough pathway meandering between the fields – Crafen had suggested that it would be unwise to let the girls mount up, for it would be impossible to stop them charging off without bringing them down with arrows (and that would be a waste of such a wonderful beast!) – the column of camouflaged men and women drew little attention until the workers began to notice the remarkably healthy horse and the two new girls. Even so, even the most curious of the workers hardly stopped off from their tasks, with only the very youngest children falling alongside the returning warriors, taking delight in mimicking the arrogant strides of the men, or the energetic prancing of this most wonderful of horses.

Despite the elaborate array of linked, small forts, the very centre of the farm was graced with what could have been a mighty citadel, the largest building that Lil had ever seen. It seemed to possess absolutely no form of fortification, however, despite the way it rose to a great height through a series of levels, each one smaller than the last, such that it could be said to be a ziggurat, a stepped pyramid: and yet it was a deliberately lop-sided pyramid, with one side long and gently sloping, while the opposing side was precipitous in the steepness of its incline. Projecting over this precipitous drop was a slight continuation of the gentler slope, like a pathway leading out into nowhere, into the darkness.

It was mainly a dark-green colour, giving it the semblance of an oddly shaped hill – indeed, it might well have been built around a hill, a means to obtain its impressive height and size – but there were also a number of rectangular panels of orange and amber, running here and there along the sides of each level. Every wall was strewn with thick white arrows, with numbers and letters forming a bewildering variety of words, many of them repeated.

From a distance, not one of these words made any sense to Lil: and yet as she drew closer, she began to recognise the same formulations of the letters she'd sensed lying within the book: Reading, Northampton, Winchester, and Cambridge.

*

The vast majority of the words decorating the sides of the structure remained unrecognisable and illegible to Lil, for she hadn't sensed any similar groupings of letters within the book. Even when she began to realise that some of the words had been positioned incorrectly, such that they ran up or down rather than from left to right, or had even been placed upside down, the only words she found herself familiar with where the place names she had come across in the book's tattered pages.

Now amongst these recognisable words she found Bedford, Woburn, Marlborough and Worcester, all repeated a surprising number of times, as indeed were the earlier spotted Winchester and Cambridge. The words doubtlessly remained completely meaningless to the people who had placed them here, for it appeared to be the positions of the arrows that interested them most, these being used to produce an elaborate patterning, the words similarly used as nothing but a form of graphic decoration.

The closer they drew towards the looming structure, the more Lil saw that the paintwork was fading and badly scraped, the side panels buckled, battered, and rarely neatly abutting their neighbours. Where the paint had entirely flaked away, the dull glint of metal shone through wherever the sun struck it directly, a sure sign that these panels were salvaged materials from the earlier Golden Age: though Lil had never come across such an abundance of reclaimed metal that it could be utilised as nothing but the ornamentation of what appeared to be an impractical and possibly useless structure.

A temple, isn't that what these people had called it?

At the base of the gentle slope, Lil could now see a series of gaily coloured and garlanded wooden posts, but none of the people appeared to be heading this way, even when the narrow track they had been following began to widen considerably. Rather, they were steadily beginning to disperse, no doubt heading off towards their own homes.

The woman who had given the impression that she was in charge of at least this small band signalled towards Sis, Lil and two of the female warriors that she wanted them all to follow her as she struck off towards the nearest side of the pyramid, the one that steadily rose through its levels at a more reasonable and regular inclination. The bulk of the column of camouflaged warriors continued on its way, worryingly leading the horse away with them; yet as Sis seemed unfazed by this, Lil decided that she too needn't remain anxious about it.

The arrows and letters were far larger and more imposing than Lil had first supposed when seeing them from a distance, the buckled metal sheets towering over her as they all drew closer to the almost perpendicular lower wall of the temple. The paintwork was also even more scratched and flaking than she had first surmised, the arrow no longer entirely complete, the letters of the place names worn almost to nothing in many cases.

Lil failed to see what purpose these massive, painted sheets of metal could have served in the Golden Age. They could have been the dislodged pages of a book constructed for the use of an immensely strong giant.

The woman was leading them all closer to a 'page' that, disappointingly, was amongst the least impressive, its size hardly comparable to the very largest adorning the wall here. It also featured one slightly bent arrow, and only four names, all of them badly despoiled, two of them just another Winchester and a Cambridge.

Lying in between them, however, was the word Buckingham: as in the duke who controlled the king, the duke who was the Devil himself!

And yet the fourth word, although battered to a state of almost complete illegibility, was more interesting still.

There was an incomplete but obviously capitalised N, followed by an 'a', an 's', and then a paint-scraped small gap preceding a 'b', ' a', and 'y'.

_Nasebay_.

*

# Chapter 9

'It's _slightly_ different,' Lil pointed out, but only a little doubtfully.

'Spellings of place names always change over hundreds of years: people see a name, look at the area – such, as in this case, which is probably a coastal area – and bit by bit "by" becomes "bay".'

Sis grinned exultantly: this was the place she had been looking for.

The place where she would meet the Devil.

Fight him.

And defeat him.

'But which _way_?' Lil asked as she forlornly took in all the symbols adorning the temple's side. 'All these arrows: but we don't know which way they _originally_ pointed.'

'The change in the name helps us: we know we need to head towards not just the _coast_ , but also a _bay_.'

Sis looked hopefully towards the patiently waiting women, presuming that her conversation with Lil would not only have been overheard but – together with her added emphasis on the word _bay_ – it might also have sparked recognition amongst the warriors of any similarity to a nearby area of coastline.

'The sea's only a half day's walk from here,' the woman said, 'but this is a well populated area; you'd need an escort to be safe.'

Sis shrugged nonchalantly.

'Just return our horse and point us in the right direc–'

'Thank you,' Lil interrupted, glowering at Sis in her exasperation: she didn't want either these people or anyone else they met on their journey harmed if it were possible to avoid it. 'We'd be glad of an escort.'

The woman rewarded her with a satisfied nod.

'Your horse will be the cost of your escort,' she insisted sternly.

*

Naturally, Lil wondered if she'd done the right thing when she'd prevented Sis taking the horse and leaving, by force if necessary.

They had lost their horse, and lost time too, the woman – who had at last introduced herself as Frenda – assuring them that they could all leave as soon as she and her best warriors had refreshed themselves in readiness for not only a possibly arduous journey but also any potential 'obstacles to their passage' they might have to overcome; but all this seemed to be taking far longer than Lil had expected.

It wasn't so much the time taken to 'refresh' – the rest, the drink, the food, the general easing of strained muscles – but the apparently far more important need to 'gain the trust and support of the gods': for, Frenda assured them earnestly, their journey would undoubtedly be a dangerous one, as it necessarily took them through the lands of rival communities, each one of whom would have to grant permission of safe passage.

Otherwise they would be attacked, under suspicion of being a warring party, or at least a scouting expedition.

Moreover, the gods and their servants were against anyone travelling too far outside of their own domains, for all of the peoples and their realms had been promised protection; and that, of course, included protection from the unwanted intrusion of warriors from any neighbouring communities. Many people who had set off on unannounced journeys had simply vanished, with no trace of them ever found again.

'And these gods: who are they?' Sis asked with a shrewdly deceptive innocence. 'Has anyone ever _seen_ them?'

'Of course!' Frenda snapped. 'Do you take us for fools?'

They were sitting cross-legged upon the ground, eating from a low table that had been placed not far from the fan-like concourse of gaily-decorated poles fronting the temple. Children were rushing excitedly about the area, strewing the posts with even more decorations, even more brightly coloured streamers of embroidered material, of vines, clematis, and branches.

Each pole had been set into the ground within the centre of a geometric shape inscribed into a grounding of painstakingly smoothed rock, the shapes varying from rectangles, triangles, circles, polygons, crescents, and even stars. All of them were drawn and organised so that they neatly abutted each other, forming a complex pattern, a system made all the more elaborate and colourful by the pictographs painted within each shape: birds, animals, planets. It was a pattern that continued up the gentle slope of the pyramid, for rather than a flight of steps granting access to the structure's apex there was instead a smooth ramp, one becoming increasingly narrow as it strove towards the peak –where, finally, it sprang off out into space, becoming the projection Lil had first noticed when they had earlier approached the looming ziggurat.

Like Sis, Lil slowly ate the food so kindly offered to them, not wishing to cause offence by refusing, not wanting to draw attention to their lack of need for sustenance.

'Then, if you've _seen_ them,' Sis continued with her sceptical probing, 'what do they _look_ like?'

'Like the true, ever-reborn god himself,' Frenda confidently replied, 'they are the perfect mix of animal and man – men with the powers of the lion, the eagle, the bull and the bear.'

*

# Chapter 10

Sis and Lil exchanged knowing glances, recognising that the mention of lion and eagle men tallied with their witnessing of the fight between the hybrid creatures.

'We've seen these "gods",' Sis said, frowning sceptically at Frenda as she disdainfully emphasised the word, 'seen them fighting each other.'

'Then you are blessed,' Frenda replied graciously, 'for what you saw was the trial of kingship, when the chosen from each of the four houses must decided between themselves who will rule for the next year.'

'One was killed: hardly god-like,' Sis continued harshly. 'When we inspected his corpse, it was obvious he was just a man, someone who had had all his eagle parts grafted onto him when he was younger.'

'They are the servants of the gods, semi-gods rather than fully divine,' an unruffled Frenda calmly persisted, displaying neither rancour nor annoyance at Sis's aggressively disrespectful tone. 'They are made in the image of the ever-risen god, a state we all aspire to.'

'So, is he a lion, or an eagle? Or maybe a bear or a bull?'

'He is all of the four houses at once, choosing only the one form when he first arises, a means of endorsing the victorious new king.'

'If a lion-man becomes king, this god rises from death as a lion-man too?'

Frenda simply nodded in response to Lil's query.

'And people have seen this, this rising from death?'

Sis still refused to temper her irreverential attitude. All this belief in an ever-risen god struck her as an obvious nonsense.

'Of course!' Frenda retorted. 'I have witnessed it myself on _many_ occasions!'

*

Lil was relieved to see that Sis was quite relaxed about the delay to their journey.

(As for the stealing of their horse, Lil wasn't quite sure how that matter would end up being resolved.)

Of course, Sis might well have been far less complacent about the delay if it hadn't actually worked in their favour. For one of the two women who had accompanied them when Frenda had first revealed Nasebay's location had nervously come forward to suggest that there might have been a mistake in presuming it lay on the coast rather than simply lying close to it: indeed, she claimed she had seen these very same 'marks and figures' prominently on display a little further inland, a fact she wished to prove by pointing out a similar set of symbols lying on the temple's precipitous rear.

Getting to the rear of the temple was nowhere near as easy as it would have been before the preparations for the celebrations had got underway. Large metal sheets, burnished to a mirror finish, where being set up each side of the pyramid, a shield wall that also extended to completely encircle the ground to the temple's rear.

'When the ceremony starts,' Frenda explained, 'this briefly becomes the abode of the gods, and so no one is allowed near.'

The sign the woman pointed out to them all was even smaller than the metallic sheet painted with the word 'Nasebay', although it was just as battered, every bit as badly scraped. The place name was even less legible than before, in fact, and yet it was plain enough to see that it was indeed the name they were looking for, another directional sign (if that is indeed what it used to be, it was now unfortunately repositioned and therefore more or less useless) for 'Nasebay', the middle letter 'e' virtually obliterated but for the remnant's of its top and bottom curves, its capital almost non-existent.

Yet there were two other words next to it that both Sis and Lil immediately recognised as ones they had come across within the book. The word 'Community' came straight after 'Nasebay', while above it there was the name of a person rather than a place name; 'Newton'.

The woman explained that she had tied this sign in with what she had seen while leading a dangerous foraging mission south – as opposed to east, where the coast lay – because she had seen and recognised _both_ these 'sets of marks' there. On seeing the marks, however, she had commanded that her warriors should withdraw, as she took them to be symbols related to the gods, going by their positioning on the dark-side of the temple.

'It seems the gods might approve of this journey after all,' Frenda had announced with a strange hint of disappointment. 'But we will see: the ceremony will be our final confirmation as to whether we make this trip or not.'

*

# Chapter 11

As they had made their way back towards the table that had been set out with food and drink for them, they passed the men and women setting up poles within sockets carved into the centre of each of the geometric shapes decorating the slope. As soon as a post was secured, excited children would dart forward to drape it with brightly dyed garlands, using either crude ladders or even clambering up onto each other's shoulders to reach the top.

The garlands weren't left hanging, however, but were gathered up into bunches on top of the posts, a loose knot securing them, the left–over ends twisted together with what could have been either a sticky pitch or tar.

As Lil observed the elaborate procedures, she noticed that almost all of the posts and garlands adorning both the slope and the concourse were treated in this way, the bunches and their stiffly upright twists appearing from a distance like so many brightly coloured flames. Yet on the very edges of the concourse, every garland was left hanging down and, unlike all the other posts, they were in every colour of the rainbow.

No doubt sensing Lil's mix of fascinated curiosity and puzzlement, Frenda explained that every child would be expected to – and indeed, would be eager to – take part in the ceremony, for Sis and Lil's arrival provided an unexpected opportunity for two of them to be raised up by the gods into the select band of those chosen for greater things.

'It all begins with every child taking a garland and dancing around the posts, moving on to a nearby pole whenever they can grasp a free garland of a colour they would find lying either side of their own garland on the rainbow.'

'A game, then: that's all it is?' Lil queried with a thankful sigh of relief.

'Aren't games sometimes the fairest way of selecting the most deserving of elevation?' Frenda said with a satisfied grin.

Naturally, Lil couldn't see how such a chaotic dance could enable any kind of selection unless someone was tasked with rating their individual skills, but before she could ask for any clarification Sis had her own query to make.

'You say two will be chosen because of _our_ arrival?' she said sternly. 'Yet we won't be staying.'

Frenda couldn't hide that she was surprised by Sis's firm assurance that they would be moving on.

'But where could be better to live than here?' she said, indicating their pleasant surroundings with a wave of her hand, the food and drink laid out before them with a satisfied gaze. 'How far have you travelled? Tell me truthfully, have you ever come across any other community more secure than ours?'

Lil found that she had to nod in agreement: it had been a shock that the previous farm had apparently remained undiscovered and therefore completely untouched by marauding gangs, but her surprise had been greater still when she had realised that this much larger and therefore more obvious community had also escaped without the slightest signs of attempted plunder. Moreover, from what Frenda had said earlier about the need to receive permission to safely travel through the other nearby farms and communities, it would seem that a large number of well-established communities had managed to escape completely unscathed.

Could this belief in these bizarre animal gods really offer the worshippers such incredibly high levels of protection?

How did it work?

Did they all rally to the defence of each other when one group came under attack?

Surely this declaration that they all came under the protection of their gods wasn't any real explanation at all!

Then again, was it possible to explain Frenda's heartfelt assertion that many had witnessed the death and subsequent resurrection of their god?

Any one who doubted that he had originally been put to death were invited to insert their hands into the bloody wound caused by the spear that had been deliberately plunged deeply into his heart.

To feel, too, the coldness, the clamminess of his rapidly cooling skin. To check that he was no longer breathing, that his blood no longer freely flowed throughout his body.

Once he had been wrapped in a shroud, he was placed on clear display for far less than three hours within a glass coffin.

A man or woman from each community formed the guard, and Frenda herself had once willingly taken on this role.

There was no opportunity for the devious swapping of a corpse for a live person, she had assured a sceptical Sis, an awed Lil.

Indeed, she had seen the shroud itself moving slightly, much as the closely observed cocoon of a transforming pupa might be seen to tremble as the change took place.

And yes, when he arose, he had changed, becoming part lion, bear, eagle or bull.

But what remained of the man, Frenda had hurriedly explained, catching once again the doubt in Sis's questioning eyes, was still instantly recognisable as the man they had originally interred within the transparent casket.

What's more, she had added triumphantly, he would soon be taken up to the abode of the gods; and yet when he returned the following year, it was 'always, always the _very_ same man!'

As Lil once again recalled Frenda's insistence that the risen god was a real, even tangible being, there most have been something within her expression – wonder, perhaps, maybe even a wish to believe in something so truly remarkable and wonderful – that was not only plain to see but also effortlessly decipherable.

'Every traveller who passes this way at first refuses to believe that our security is wholly down to the protection of our gods and their servants,' Frenda said, 'yet eventually, if not soon, they all come to be the most sincere adherents of our belief

'"Masters' commands come with a power resistless,"' Sis intoned, a line that Lil recognised as a quote from Milton taken from the book; a line proclaiming that subservience was a choice made, '"to such as owe them absolute subjection."'

Naturally, Frenda was completely unaware that it was a quote: yet she surely understood that Sis was insulting her. She glowered back at Sis, a grimace that was also full of suspicion.

'Our gods have spared us even from this Nemesis I believe I heard you admiringly referring to earlier,' she snapped.

'You've heard of her?'

Sis was at last curious rather than irate, Lil was relieved to note. She didn't even bother correcting Frenda's naturally unintentional misnaming.

'Hasn't everyone heard at least one of the ridiculous tales surrounding her?' Frenda replied aggressively. 'Isn't _she_ the one everyone makes themselves submissive to, even before they have actually witnessed for themselves her destructiveness, her mercilessness, her inhumanity to her – no, surely they _can't_ be her _fellow_ humans? Surely, she's _inhuman_ ; maybe even some goddess herself – which can only mean she's the Devil incarnate!'

'Ah, so you too, have heard of this Devil?' Sis asked with sudden interest.

'Haven't I just said that I have?' Frenda retorted, misinterpreting Sis's query. 'This Nemô, as I've heard her called, this "dispenser of dues".'

'Hah, I've heard these versions of the tales, too,' Sis responded calmly, even jocularly. 'Yet I find them hard to believe, don't you? That this girl bothers carrying around with her this Wheel of Fate, this Scourge of an apple branch. What would be the sense in wielding such useless items?'

As she spoke, Sis exaggeratedly opened up her arms, her palms uppermost, as if – Lil thought – she was going out of her way to demonstrate to Frenda that she carried nothing similar to these devices.

Was she, Lil bemusedly wondered, attempting to allay Frenda's suspicions that she might be linked in some way to these tales of Nemesis? Certainly, Frenda was glaring at Sis in a way that reeked distrust, even great dislike: yet that was perfectly understandable, as Sis's attitude towards her had been at best constantly disdainful, whereas now it was bizarrely hostile.

In fact, Frenda was now eying them both with undisguised wariness, such that Lil could almost guess what she was thinking: how had two young girl's not only survived their travels, but had also come through them looking healthy and well-fed? Moreover, how had they come through all those dangerous lands retaining possession of a thoroughbred horse that even the most placid farmer would kill for?

'Such a tale is one I find hard to believe myself,' Frenda agreed, 'and yet we have many travellers arriving here who swear they have witnessed the destruction waged in her name: for that is what I believe these tales _really_ refer to – the callous murders deliberately perpetrated by those who _worship_ her, who may well have been given extra powers to carry out their mayhem!'

Before she could make her accusation any plainer, she was interrupted by an abrupt blare of horns and shrieking reed flutes. There was a sudden onrush of children towards the nearest posts where, each grabbing a hanging garland, everyone immediately whirled into an excitable little dance to the beat of a number of drums of different sizes and tones.

'You will, of course, be taking part in the game?' Frenda asked, her tone hard and brooking no disagreement. 'Or do you fear what the judgement of our gods will be?'

Sis hung back, clearly intending to resist any effort to force her into joining the dance, a move that elicited a similarly irate response from a number of well-armed warriors who had quietly enveloped their little group under the cover of the chaotic surge of children.

Lil, wishing to make amends, wishing Sis hadn't been so rudely belligerent, jumped up and grabbed the older girl's hand, dragging her into the throng of children still searching for a garland they could hold.

'Why are you being so _awful_ to her?' Lil furiously snapped at Sis as soon as they were out of Frenda's hearing. 'What has she done wrong to deserve all _that_?'

Sis nonchalantly took the garland Lil was forcing into her hand. She even made a half-hearted attempt at looking like she was following the simple dance steps.

'This, this _isn't_ a _game_ , Lil!' Sis stated bluntly. 'It's a way to choose which children will be sacrificed to their gods!'

*

# Chapter 12

'So how come _you're_ suddenly so concerned about these children?'

Lil glared angrily at Sis as they both went through the motions of participating in the dance. Unlike the other children, however, they remained together, keeping a tight hold of their original garlands.

All around them, the other children were gracefully swirling from one post to another, reaching out for any freely hanging garlands of the right colour, joyously joining in with the circular dance of another group before – as soon as they could – moving on to yet another clutch of dancers.

'You took on the role of being my conscience, remember?' Sis responded with a wry grin. 'Bedsides, this is their own children they're betraying; murdering them for no real purpose. I'm – as the tales _correctly_ tell – simply a "deliver of dues".'

Her face was briefly aptly illuminated in a glow of flames, the shimmering of the flickering red light coming from a number of blazing torches being wielded by men setting alight the knotted tops of the next line of posts. As soon as the tarred tops were fiercely ablaze, the men moved on to the next row of posts, obviously with the intention of lighting every knot on every post, including those running up the pyramid's slope.

'What should we do? Can we stop this?'

Lil glanced about herself anxiously, wondering which of these innocently ecstatic children would end up being amongst the 'chosen'.

'If necessary, I can–'

'No, Sis!' Lil proclaimed firmly. 'There _must_ be some _other_ way!'

Sis merely shrugged; if she wasn't allowed to stop all this _her_ way, what other way was there?

Around them, there was a sudden, frantic surge of movement, many of the children darting towards the next row of posts as, with a splutter of the last, dying flames, the knotted tops burnt through and the garlands dropped like abruptly loosened hair. Those unable to find the right coloured garlands feverishly moved as quickly as they could along the first row, searching for the colours that would allow them to move on into the second row.

But by the time they had done this, many had already moved onto the third row, and even the fourth wherever the knots had burnt through much more rapidly than the others.

'If we _win_ , Sis – what can they do _then_?' a wide-eyed Lil breathlessly declared.

Before Sis could answer, Lil had reached for and grabbed a freely trailing garland hanging from the next row of posts; and then just as quickly, just as deftly – as if she had innately grasped the essence of the game – she moved onto the third, fourth, and even the fifth row.

The frenziedly drumming music drowned out Sis's warning cry to her.

'Lil, no! I think it's _winning_ the game that somehow actually _kills_ you!'

*

The pitched knot of every post running up the temple's slope was now ablaze.

The already bright glow was reflected innumerable times within the mirrored surfaces of the metallic sheets set up on either side of the pyramid. It was like a wall of gigantic flames, the shimmering glare intensified to a point where it was painful to look at.

Everything beyond seemed impossibly dark by comparison – the abode of the gods.

It was already late evening, the sky darkening ominously, the smoke from so many flames adding to the sense that the whole world was undergoing a transformation.

The swirling mass of children flowed across the concourse like a flood of debris-littered waters, a few of them already nearing the lower slope of the temple. Two girls in particular were especially skilled at moving from post to post, apparently innocently well practised.

Only Lil seemed to be giving them any real competition.

Sis watched Lil's ominously rapid progress, keeping up with her as well as she could without using the special abilities that would prove Frenda's suspicions right.

As the slope narrowed, the movement from segment to segment became harder, requiring ever greater skill at spotting the colours to aim for, a need to be always looking a few moves ahead.

Lil's more instinctive style of playing the game was paying off. She took the lead.

Sis prepared to rush forward if needs be, forgoing the rules of the game, casting aside any worries about revealing her true nature.

As the last flame released its knot of coloured garlands, Lil jumped into the last segment, the one precariously protruding over the area of a pure, precipitous darkness.

And then, thankfully, she stopped; she waited there, wondering what she was supposed to do next.

One of the other girls leapt into the last segment almost directly after her.

With a triumphant cry of 'What are you waiting for?' she grabbed hold of Lil's hand: and then leapt out into the darkness, pulling Lil with her.

*

# Chapter 13

As the two girl's leapt out over the precipitous drop, they briefly flared like an exploding sun.

Then there was nothing there but the pure darkness once more.

'Lil!'

Sis was aghast. Amazed.

Even she hadn't expected this; that the children would willingly leap to their deaths.

All around her the dance had come to a halt. Instead, everyone was clapping, cheering.

The music had changed too, no longer a dance beat but one of exultation.

No longer caring about trying to hide who she really was, Sis rushed up the slope.

Even as she drew closer and closer to the pyramid's peak, she could see that there really was nothing but a deep black, a sheer drop, beyond the protruding pathway.

Even so, she didn't slow her run.

Rather, she leapt out into that blackness.

But there was no enveloping flash of light for her.

She was falling.

Falling through the darkness.

*

# Chapter 14

Although she couldn't see it in the darkness, Sis knew the ground must be rushing up towards her.

She called on the vines, the branches, to rush up towards her faster than the ground.

Of course, the area behind the pyramid had been painstakingly cleared of wild plants.

But just beneath the soil, nature can hardly ever be prevented from stretching out, from spreading and reclaiming her domain.

The roots, the tendrils of invasive vines, the young and supple shoots of bushes, all eagerly answered Sis's call.

Springing from the earth as if time itself had been speeded up, they all soared rapidly upwards, reaching out for Sis with their tenderly enwrapping coils.

Held within their soft embrace, Sis's fall was slowed.

She landed lithely upon on the round, the fronds instantly releasing her.

However, the elongated stems didn't shrink back to their original size, to how they had been only moments before.

Rather, they waited: waited for any further instructions.

Sis knelt on the ground, feeling the soil.

'Tell me,' she said to the waiting tendrils, 'what lies _beneath_ here?'

*

The soil creaked, cracked: and the previously hidden roots of the plants began to swiftly erupt from the earth.

They moved the soil aside, excavating it efficiently. In particular, they dragged away a layer of earth that, surprisingly, contained hardly any substantial roots at all. Beneath it was a large rectangle of painted metal, one edged with a low lip that had held the layer of soil in place as if contained within a huge, open box.

The roots continued to bring up more earth, to reveal more of the area surrounding this shallow 'metallic box': for surprisingly, yet more heavy sheets of metal extended away from it on all sides, there being only the very slightest of gaps between the box shape and the other metallic plates.

The roots probed into this small gap, sending out the thinner tendrils of fresh growth to penetrate even the smallest crack. Then rapidly growing, thickening as if over years of growth, the roots began to first buckle the metal surrounding the box then prise it upwards, enlarging the gap considerably.

With a nod of thanks to the still eagerly writhing stems, Sis slipped down into the hole, using a long strand of root as if it were a dangling rope.

*

Sis slid down into what she soon realised was a dimly lit room.

Beneath what had appeared to be the shallow box there were deeper, metallic sides, although the wall alongside the swiftly descending Sis had been partially cut away, revealing a heavily padded interior.

Sis glanced inside, hoping to see that Lil and the other girl had landed safely amongst the cushioned materials rather than falling to their deaths. The container was empty, however, although Sis still clung to the hope that this darkly painted box had somehow been raised high enough in the darkness of the pyramid's rear to form a safe landing place for anyone who had earlier leapt off the projecting pathway.

Around the opening there were a number of bright mirrors, angled so that any bright light projected from below would form a sudden, blinding glare: a glare similar to an exploding sun.

Beneath the container there was a concertinaed extending-arm construction of multiple, pivoted beams and struts. Alongside was a large capstan, one built for a sizable group of men to handle, and no doubt only recently utilised to raise the box to a point where it would have lain hidden in the darkness lying beyond the innumerable reflections of flaring flames.

It was all equipment recovered for the much earlier Golden Age, once powered by oil but now requiring the brute force of men. The only oil available now was that used to keep the dull lanterns sizzling, and even these were luxuries. The whole room was ancient, irregular in its battered state, yet still beyond the skills of present-day man to construct.

As Sis softly dropped to the ground, she paused, listening for any noise that might lead her to Lil.

She could hear talking, muted laughter. But it wasn't Lil, or the girl.

It was men she could hear talking. Probably the men who had manhandled this capstan, leaving as soon as they'd lowered the box and its extending arm.

If that was indeed the case, the chances were they would have the two girls with them.

Sis broke into a sprint, a run that would soon have her overtaking the casually retreating men.

*

# Chapter 15

There were about five of them, a mix of men and women.

But there was no sign of Lil or the other girl.

The man called Crafen was amongst them however, one of the men who seemed to have some vestige of power within this community.

He might know where Lil had been taken.

Sis rushed straight amongst them, effortlessly picking Crafen up off the floor with a hand to the throat.

'My friend: where is she?'

Quickly overcoming their shock, Crafen's group crowded around Sis, moving in to swiftly restrain her: then stopped, their eyes wide with terror as they each abruptly realised they had also been grabbed tightly around the throat.

They gawped in bewilderment at the thickly entwined strands of Sis's ridiculously long hair that had taken on a life of their own, incongruously rippling in the air like peaceful waves even as their tips curled firmly around necks, arms and legs. Worse still, however, were the thinner strands of hair, the ones that pointed ominously at the forehead of each man, each woman, as if about to be driven home like the very finest stiletto.

'I don't _want_ to kill you,' Sis reassured them (completely surprising herself when she realised this was true), 'but I _will_ if you don't help me!'

' _Nemesis_!' Crafen hissed with difficulty between his forcibly clenched teeth. 'It _is_ you!'

Sis sensed the shudder of fear that instantly coursed through everyone around her.

She was used to detecting that undercurrent of horror, that anxiety that death is close.

'No, no: she has _wings_ ...' a woman protested fearfully, 'I'd heard she has _wings_!'

That was another thing Sis was used to experiencing: the foolishness of men, of women, who sought to deny whatever was quite plainly happening to them, as if it might somehow result in them being spared.

'The gods; you can't defeat the _gods_!' Crafen chuckled grimly.

'That's for me to find out: where _is_ she?'

She tightened her hand, chocking Crafen all the more.

Crafen's eye's popped, his face creasing in fear as it dawned on him that he could no longer breathe.

'They've taken them, taken the girls!'

It was one of the other men who had spoken, one who had originally managed to draw his sword only to find that Sis's serpentine-like hair had snatched it from his hand and contemptuously cast it aside.

'The gods?' Sis sneered.

'No, no: Frenda, and some of her guard.' Another man struggled out the words as he vainly attempted to pull the tight cord of hair away from his throat. 'Out to the plain, where they'll be offered to the dragon!'

'The _dragon_?' Sis repeated, feeling totally confused for the first time in her life.

*

The 'plain', as the man had described it, wasn't far away: nothing more than a swift horse ride.

It was a plain, however, only in that it was a relatively flat area, and even then it was one hidden low within a depression. There was hardly any natural light left to illuminate it, but Frenda and her guardians had brought a small number of lanterns.

In their oily yellow light, Sis could easily make out that two gaily decorated posts projected up from the plain's centre.

One of the women was brutally tying the already gagged and bound girl to one of the posts.

And Lil was already firmly secured to the other.

*

# Chapter 16

The women who survived would doubtlessly describe it later as nothing more than a sense that a breeze was passing amongst them in the darkness. A breeze that abruptly began to tear at them as if they had been hit by the very sharpest hailstones.

That was their very first and, in some cases, only intimation that this offering to their gods wasn't about to progress as smoothly as it usually did.

The cuts they suffered were so fine, so razor-like, that it wasn't possible to understand how seriously they had been injured until they found arms and legs no longer responding to the urgently shrieking commands of bewildered minds.

Hair that's lashed forward as violently as if caught within a hurricane can do that.

Hair that's readily shed, such that it becomes more piercing than any needle, can do even more damage.

' _Invidia_!' someone shrieked in terror, calling out yet another name of Nemesis, confusing the lashing of the hair with that of a mercilessly wielded bridle.

It was all over so quickly, Sis sparing only Frenda and a woman who had fallen to her knees, as if in worship.

Damn! Lil was making her soft!

Rather than killing Crafen and his group, she had left them firmly bound and gagged within long strands of her hair, hair she had shed as easily and simply as trees rid themselves of unwanted stems. In the same way, she now secured Frenda and her guard, reining them in, wheeling them around – lifting them both up off the ground as a butcher might weigh up his meat in a balance.

'I know threatening to kill _you_ won't make you explain what's going on here,' Sis said quietly to Frenda. 'But I can kill your _friend_.'

With a slight tightening of the noose of hair, Sis began to slowly choke the frenziedly writhing woman.

'If we refuse the gods their chosen offering, they will destroy us _all_ ,' Frenda replied remarkably calmly.

'Then _I'll_ destroy your gods!' Sis starkly assured her.

'If you remove their offerings, they won't come; _then_ how will you destroy them?'

'I'll _find_ them.'

The surrounding darkness was suddenly rent with a heavy thrumming, like the regular but incredibly rapid beat of an unimaginably powerful heart. The soil about their feet, the looser strands of hair, even the flaps of their clothes, began to rise and flutter in an increasingly powerful wind beating down on them from above.

'There's no need to find them,' Frenda sneered triumphantly. 'The dragon is _here_!'

*

Almost storm like in its aggressive pummelling, the wind worked in concert with the throbbing beat, seemingly coursing through their very bodies, pounding at and shaking their very being. The air whipped about them all, enveloping everyone in a ferocious whirling of sharply invasive dust.

The dim glow of the lamps reflected back from dark scales, hinting at a shape that could be a huge serpent head. The thundering wings could be seen as nothing but a frantic swirling of the blackness, but their power was unmistakable, the tremendous beating of the air forcing anyone below to shield themselves from its violent battering.

If she hadn't been so taken by surprise, Sis could have resisted the urge to shield herself form the whiplashing gusts: but, besides, she wanted the dragon to land, to draw it down to where it would be easier to grab, easier to handle.

Even she couldn't fly, despite the stories that she could, that she had wings.

Beneath her feet, the ground itself trembled. Then it quaked, cracked.

There was an ominous sound of tearing earth, of soil shrieking as it was compelled to split.

The two posts were ripped from the ground, rushing up into the darkness, the ragged clothes of Lil and the girl tied to the other pole fluttering chaotically in the dulled light like panicked moths.

Sis caught a glimpse of dark claws clenched around the tops of the posts. But the rest of the dragon was already vanishing once again into a sky as dark as its own scales; for it was already turning, flying away, rising rapidly.

Sis dropped the two women, reaching out instead with her hair towards the hurriedly disappearing dragon.

But the dragon was moving too swiftly, even for Sis. The urgently writhing ends of her hair snatched at nothing but the darkness.

Sis shrieked with frustration.

Lil had gone.

She had vanished with the dragon.

*

# Chapter 17

Even though the dragon could no longer be seen, the rumbling of the earth, even of the air, briefly continued.

Then, high above, there was a rippling of movement, a flare of white.

Like a falling star, plummeting towards the earth: becoming ever brighter as it reflected more and more of the lanterns' dim light.

For, of course, it had no light of its own.

The ragged clothes fluttered once more; then struck the ground with a brutal thud.

Lil. Or the other girl.

Sis rushed towards the crumpled body, her hair reaching out far before her. Hair that picked up and cradled the girl tenderly.

The body was limp, lifeless; just about every bone shattered

It wasn't Lil.

Sis sighed with relief.

*

Sis sensed the presence of the two women before she heard the rattling of disturbed stones.

She should have killed them, as she used to do before she'd met Lil.

Not that they would be any problem for her: it was just an inconvenience.

Carefully, she placed the girl's crumpled body on the floor.

The two women hung back: they weren't stupid after all. They knew they would lose any fight.

'This is what we feared,' Frenda explained, indicating the body with a slight tilting of her head. 'She hadn't been properly secured to the post.'

'You were going to sacrifice her anyway,' Sis pointed out.

Frenda nodded in agreement.

'Yes; yet this way, she dies for no reason. For no advantage to anyone.'

'Aah, I see – your _fear_ is that your offering is _incomplete_?'

Frenda gave another nod of her head, this time a little ashamedly.

'I need to know where my friend has been taken,' Sis demanded.

'The gods will come to us,' the other women announced worriedly. 'They'll want to know why our offering wasn't adequate; to punish us.'

'Then I'll wait,' Sis said. 'And prove to you that these are _not_ gods!'

*

There wasn't long to wait.

In that short time, there had been many arguments amongst the people once Frenda had explained to them what had happened.

'We could flee.'

'They would find us; chase us down.'

'Surely they'll understand when we explain what happened; that this strange girl was at fault.'

Frenda hadn't revealed Sis's true nature to the assembled crowd.

She had put the deaths of the other warriors down to an implied attack by Sis in the darkness, using arrows and blowpipes.

'What have you brought down upon us?' some had furiously demanded of Sis.

'Nothing: there will be no harm to you if I stay,' Sis had replied.

'Hah, only if we offer you as their new prize!'

'Yet she wasn't the _chosen_ : even _that_ won't appease the gods!'

'Do we fight? Do we defend ourselves?' someone had asked fearfully.

'Against the gods? There is _no_ defence against them!' Frenda spat back sourly.

'Wise, very wise.'

This was the gruff voice of a man, a man who appeared from between the rocks as if he had been a part of them.

He moved as stealthily, as precisely, as an animal.

Which was no surprise.

For the man was also half lion.

*

# Chapter 18

'Frenda, you know the price for refusal of a request for an offering.'

The man spoke politely and, ostensibly, reasonably. He glanced suspiciously at Sis, as if recognising that she was new here.

'It wasn't a refusal on our part, Droken,' Frenda replied, a slight tremor in her voice. 'The girl was offered, as requested; she slipped from the post.'

'Slipped?' Droken grinned maliciously. 'Then ceremonial procedures were not followed: a crime against the rule of the gods in its own right.'

'We will arrange another offering, or more, if you deem it necessary to make amends.'

'And yet – these extra offerings would not be our _originally_ chosen, would they?'

There was an undoubted menace in his tone, even a sense of joy that he could torture Frenda and her people in this way.

As he spoke, more hybrid men appeared from the surrounding rocks. Men who were also part lion – albeit in different ways, with a difference in limbs, even in the make up of their heads – but also men (there were no women) who were part bear, bull, or eagle.

'The offering _was_ made,' Frenda persisted nervously, utilising a slight crooking of fingers to indicate to a handful of her warriors that they should surround Sis and bring her forward. 'It cannot be laid on us that–'

'The girl you took, the one you _have_ ,' Sis interrupted, staring imperiously at Droken, letting the warriors push her closer towards him, 'she _must_ be returned.'

Droken stared back, first in amazement then amusement. He turned to glare at Frenda once more.

'Do you wish to bring the wrath of the gods down upon your pitiful community? To have it lain _completely_ to waste?'

'No, no,' Frenda pleaded, 'she's not _with_ us! We can–'

'Do you know where I might find Lil?' Sis coolly asked the man.

*

Some of Frenda's people chose to fight on the side of the gods.

Others chose to resist them.

Either way, they died easily, and in their droves.

They were no match for the servants of the gods, the humans' relatively feeble strength and agility useless against the combination of human guile and animal instinct.

However, the animalistic cunning and swift response of the hybrids presented little difficulty for Sis.

Her rapidly extending strands of hair tore through them, ripping off limbs with a sharp tug, severing others with whiplashing cuts. Swords, spears and knives were wrenched from hands, or grasped in mid air as they were cast towards Sis, becoming part of her own armoury.

Arrows were similarly stopped in mid-flight; but even if they had somehow managed to pass through the whirlwind of hair, they would have bounced harmlessly of the exoskeleton of armour that had slipped into place everywhere about Sis's body.

Shining with the emerald brightness of beetles, the sapphire of butterflies, the armour was a part of her, causing no restriction to her ease of movement. She could have easily leapt amongst the warring peoples, or somersaulted athletically if she had thought it necessary: yet she hardly moved, letting the serpentine maliciousness of her hair keep everyone at a safe distance.

With a deft swipe of a razor sharp thread of hair, Sis sliced the throat of a looming bear-man who had been on the point of finishing off Frenda, who had chosen after all to challenge the servants of the gods. Other writhing strands, swiftly enwrapping themselves around Frenda's waist and torso, dragged her back across the floor towards Sis, just as the corpse of a bull-man was similarly if less carefully pulled back towards the centre of the battle.

'I can prove these "servants of the gods" are nothing but men,' Sis announced, recalling the time she had cut deeply into the dead eagle-man, revealing the clear delineation of differently textured flesh and muscles – all indications of an unnatural process of grafting.

This time, she didn't bend down to make her incisions: she allowed the threads of her hair to precisely slice, to pull flesh, muscle and veins aside.

But this was a post mortem that didn't go the way Sis had expected.

For there was no difference at all in the constitution of the flesh and muscles.

It was all of exactly the same quality, the same type.

This was no man grafted with animal elements.

This was a perfectly natural mix of man and bull.

*

Sis frowned, puzzled: and she had never, ever been quite so puzzled.

Her hair continued to cut away at the flesh, fruitlessly seeking any sign of grafting.

There were no such signs: the flesh was all of the same make-up, the same constituency.

This is how the flesh had _grown_.

_Naturally_. Despite its obviously _unnatural_ results.

'So, you were wrong,' Frenda stated flatly, betraying no sense of satisfaction as she observed Sis's confusion. 'You're not as infallible as you believed.'

There was an abrupt loud crack, the sound associated with a tree snapping, shattering.

But Sis felt a brutally hard blow to her chest, one that knocked her back, leaving her briefly unsteady on her feet.

Once again, she frowned in puzzlement. She warily glanced down at the indented armour, the hole that progressed deep into her body.

She brought her inner fibres under her control, forcing them to obey her, to push free the obstacle so painfully lodged deep within her.

To the sickening sound of slurping mud, she caught her dark blood in the palm of her hand as it ran from the hole. She looked in wonder at the small metallic object that had caused her so much agony, cylindrical and pointed like the most basic arrow tip.

She looked up, wondering where it could have come from, trying to work out why her protective veil of swirling hair hadn't stopped it.

Far off, far out of the reach of her snaking hair, she saw a lion-man pointing an oddly shaped stick at her.

The stick momentarily blazed, loudly cracked.

Sis's head was violently jerked back, a spout of darkest blood spouting from her forehead.

This time, she was dazed; she stumbled.

She fell back, landing face up on the ground. Her eyes glassy, dead.

Like the waves of a hurriedly ebbing sea, the extended threads of her hair rapidly shrank back towards her.

And the lion-man, the king of the hybrids, ululated triumphantly.

_Nothing_ could vanquish the servants of the gods!

*

# Chapter 19

High above the ground, the air had been cold.

Cold enough to put to sleep any normal girl.

Lil, however, had been wide awake.

It was a strange kind of dragon, she'd thought.

One of metal, not flesh.

The retracted arm that had let go of the other post once the poor girl had fallen was made of struts. The wings, too, were not animal like, but whirled like gigantic, impossibly fast wheels.

What had at first appeared to be a reptilian head formed the best part of the 'beast's' entire body, a square-snouted monstrosity, with eyes of glass.

And through those glassy eyes, Lil caught a glimpse of what could have been the creature's mind.

A man who was part bear.

*

As the metallic beast dropped towards the ground once more, everything below them suffered yet again from that punishing downdraft of air.

Lil was lowered first, into the hands and claws of a large group of waiting bestial men and women, all of whom worked quickly in unfastening the restraining coils of rope that bound her to the post. Then the beast itself swooped off to one side, landing a few yards away where the whirling wings wouldn't cause anyone any harm.

The men and women surrounding Lil were primarily a mix of mules and buffalo, working under the commands of a woman who was part eagle. They were neither particularly unkind nor tender in the way they cut through her bonds and began to direct her off towards a large door leading into what could only be an uncovered Golden Age building.

But then, as the eagle woman ordered the final severing of the knots binding Lil's wrists, she stopped what she was doing, her eyes wide with awe as she spotted the ruffled pages of the book remnant wedged into a dress pocket. She reached for and pulled the book free, staring with an even greater sense of awe at the title page had become the book's cover.

'Stop, stop,' she cried out excitedly, raising a hand to bring Lil's removal to a halt, even urgently grabbing the arm of a buffalo-man to ensure they all came to a stop.

The woman turned the book around so that the other bestial men and women there could also see the title page, indicating one of the bolder words with an aggressively tapping finger.

'Milton,' she sighed almost with relief. ' _Milton_!'

*

The woman was no longer interested in helping haul Lil off towards the doorway.

She turned, glancing about the busy yard. Everywhere, bestial humans were toiling laboriously on any number of tasks, but mainly stacking up horse drawn carts with all manner of materials recovered from the Golden Age.

At last the woman appeared to spot what she had been looking for. She sprinted off towards a bull-man who was overseeing a group of people cannibalising what might once have been a large machine.

Lil was bewildered by the eagle-woman's reaction to the discovery of the book.

Why had she shown such a weird interest in _Milton_?

Could she read?

How else would she have recognised the word?

The woman was eagerly showing the book to the bull-man. He appeared every bit as startled as she had been when she had first spotted the word.

Leaving the group he had been overseeing to continue with their task of breaking the machine down into usable parts, he purposely strode over towards Lil, now carrying the book that the woman had handed to him.

' _You_ brought this?' he demanded of Lil even before he was completely looming over her. 'Where did you get it from?'

'It was given to me by a friend,' Lil answered honestly.

She wanted to tell them as little as she could about the book until she knew why they were showing such a bizarre interest in it. But stating truthfully that she had been given the book was hardly revealing any important information.

'Where did _she_ get it?'

'She never said.'

The bull-man was fighting to control his frustration. He tried another tack.

'Do you know _what_ it is?'

'A treasure from the Golden Age,' Lil replied innocently.

'Do you know what it _says_?'

'Says?'

The bull-man held the book before, pointing out the words.

'The _symbols_ ; do your recognise _any_ of them?'

Lil shook head, as if confused by his question.

Realising he wasn't about to garner any new information about the book from Lil, the bull-man began to quickly scan through a few of the other pages.

He frowned, more puzzled than ever.

'Milton is a _man_? Not a _place_?'

*

# Chapter 20

The buffalo- and mule-men were curtly dismissed by the eagle-woman. They were given orders to present themselves back at the mine entrance and take fresh instructions there, as they were now relived of their duties here.

A _mine_ , Lil thought; that would explain the vast amount of recovered materials she had seen being carted away. It wasn't unknown, of course, for people to dig deeply into the earth to uncover artefacts from the Golden Age, implements that were both usable and highly tradable. But she had never heard of, let alone seen, an operation on this scale.

She was partially lifted off the floor as the eagle-woman and bull-man each took her by an arm. Rather than heading towards the doorway, however, they spun Lil around a little and headed off in a different direction, one taking them towards a much smaller door, but one guarded by two lion-men.

The inside of the building belied the fact that it must – like all the other recovered Golden Age items – have lain hidden underground for a long time. It either hadn't suffered any damage through whatever catastrophe had hit it or it had somehow been expertly repaired, even though that would require skills supposedly lost long ago. The way the tales of the devastation had it, even buildings that had survived the first waves of earthquakes, floods or storms had suffered badly once they had been steadily covered with soil and rampant vegetation.

The building's interior was spotlessly clean, itself remarkable as mud would have at some time leaked into the rooms, overlaying and staining everything. There were chairs, tables, all from the Golden Age, all of it promising undreamt of luxury.

It really did seem like the abode of the gods.

Yet it seemed that even the servants of the gods had their own hierarchy, affording them their own servile minions.

The mix of bestial men here was nowhere near as varied as that Lil had witnessed outside in the yard.

There were men and women who were partially lion, eagle, bear, or bull-like; yet that seemed to be it, apart from a small number of feline females who were constantly serving them drinks or generally waiting upon them.

Everyone there, however, stopped to stare curiously at Lil as she was led through the rooms. Obviously, it was unusual for one of the 'chosen' to be escorted through this part of the complex.

Her captors unceremoniously dragged her towards a set of swing doors, bringing them all out onto the landing of a bare set of stairs. Descending a couple of flights, they came out into even barer, colder corridors.

It was the domain of a lower level of beast, men in grimy overalls with the heads of dogs or badgers. A maintenance class.

Then again, Lil realised, as she watched the men going forlornly about their chores, how much better must this life be than being forced to engage in the laborious task of digging underground? Even if any equipment recovered as a result of that digging was reemployed to make the excavations easier, the going would still be unimaginably difficult, ridiculously dangerous: especially on the scale of the operation being undertaken here, going by the rich haul of salvaged goods Lil had seen being cleansed and broken down into usable parts.

Using only the crude tools that were available, excavating the Golden Age levels on that scale would require a _vast_ workforce.

Perhaps even people forced to be slaves.

Of course!

That was the reasoning behind the apparently preposterous games and ceremonies to determine the 'chosen'. The reason why 'offerings' of young men and women had to be made to the 'servants of the gods'.

They were simply being 'offered' up to be 'chosen' as slaves for the mines.

*

Lil still wasn't sure what these bestial people were intending to do with her.

Whatever they had in mind for her, thankfully it wasn't a place in the mines: at least, not for the moment anyway.

The discovery of the book, the recognition of that word 'Milton', appeared to have caused them to change their original plans regarding her fate.

Half way along one of the corridors, her two abductors opened the door to a small cell of a room, one with only a simple chair and a small table. They dragged her inside, gruffly forcing her to sit on the chair.

'You can wait here, until our king returns; he must decide what we should do with you.'

The bull-man let her arm go as he moved back towards the door.

'He's gone to punish your people for failing to offer up the two chosen,' the eagle-woman gloated as, joining the man, she backed out through the doorway, pulling the door closed behind her. 'Although in you, perhaps we have greater prize than we had anticipated.'

As the door finally clicked fully into place, there were further sounds of other mechanisms sliding across each other, reminding Lil of bars being slotted into place to secure the heavier wooden doors she was more used to.

She was locked in; a prisoner.

She glanced about the room, thinking it made a strange prison. Even the 'simple' chair and table would be regarded as a luxury in any other space but this, the quality of both unrepeatable by any of today's 'craftsmen'.

The back of the chair was graced with a narrow line of symbols; no, words – they were words.

_Nasebay Community_ – and then some other word Lil had never come across before, and therefore couldn't interpret.

Around her there was a short, sharp burst of movement, the memories of so many people who had passed through here so long, long ago: young people mainly, here to learn.

_College_ ; the other word was 'College', the term for a place of higher learning.

So, was this the place where the Devil taught and indoctrinated his acolytes?

But...there was something else Lil was picking up through these spirits so crowdedly thronging through her cell.

Lil moved closer, took a closer look at the words by tipping the chair forward slightly.

It didn't say _Nasebay_ after all.

_MassBay_ Community College.

A shortening of _Massachusetts_ Bay.

This _wasn't_ Naseby; that was, if this Naseby existed at all.

Sis had been wrong.

Sis wasn't infallible after all.

*

# Chapter 21

When the door was finally opened once again, there was a different man and a different woman standing there.

A man who was partially an eagle, a woman who was almost wholly bear.

Treating her every bit as unconcernedly as her pervious escorts, they each grabbed one of Lil's arms and half dragged her out into the corridor.

She couldn't have been long in her cell, Lil realised; with nothing to do, it had probably seemed far long than she might have thought if she had been otherwise occupied.

She should have asked for her book back – it would have given her something to read: a chance too, perhaps, to find out why this Milton was of such interest to these bestial men.

The again, it was this interest in him that had precipitated the book being taken from her: so it would hardly be likely that they would have relinquished it so readily.

Once again, Lil was led down the narrow corridors. This time, however, they walked past the stairwell, heading instead towards two double doors that magically slid open as soon as the bear-woman touched a button on the nearby wall. This cell was even barer than the one Lil had just been taken from, being completely empty.

Stranger still, her two escorts accompanied her into the room, staying with her as the doors magically slid shut once more. There was an unnerving series of tremors beneath her feet, a rippling that was replicated in a slight quaking of the walls. Weirder still, her stomach briefly felt heavier than the rest of her body.

When the doors slid open once more only a minute later, they opened up onto a completely different corridor, one wider and far more brightly painted than the one they had just stepped out of.

Only a little farther along, the corridor opened up into an even wider area leading to two large, oak doors. These didn't open magically, but had to be pushed open by Lil's two escorts.

It briefly seemed to Lil that they had stepped outside, or at least into a room minus two of its sides, for she could clearly see the overgrown mounds that had once been towering buildings stretching out before her. The walls were made of sheets of glass, which Lil wouldn't have believed possible if she hadn't seen it for herself.

Sheets of glass even a fraction of the size of just one of these would be a priceless commodity in any another community, reverently treated and utilised only for the most important tasks, such as promoting the growth of fresh seedlings. Yet the glass here was wasted as walls, which could have been constructed from far less precious materials.

Across most of the ceiling, the light that flooded into the room was transformed into a glittering of miniature rainbows by a multitude of hanging, silvery discs that twirled on the ends of their supporting cords. Beneath this snowstorm of coruscating light there stretched a huge, highly polished walnut table.

And at the end of the table there was a throne of glittering tubular steel, of the darkest, plumpest leather.

And seated on that throne was a king, a king as much lion as man.

*

The king's crown was made of fragmented pieces of discs similar to those hanging everywhere above them, bathing his head in a shifting cloud of rainbows.

His garments were those of a warrior rather than of a ceremonial king, however.

They were blood splattered, blood that in parts glistened sickly, as if relatively fresh.

As Lil was callously brought before him, he glowered at her intently, curiously: and with a sharply curbed startled widening of the eyes, as if he recognised something about her.

'I think I can handle a girl on my own,' he said with a dismissive wave to the escorting beasts.

Even so, despite his air of confidence, as the bestial man and woman backed out of the door he reached for an oddly shaped stick of both wood and iron which he pointed menacingly at Lil.

'I _know_ you,' he said with only the slightest hint of uncertainty, his voice surprisingly free of any bestial qualities. 'You were with _that_ girl – your hair! Let me see your hair!'

He leapt up with all the abruptness and grace of lion, a semi paw-like hand grasping Lil aggressively by the hair. He pulled on it violently, as if expecting it at any moment to grow, to whirl about the room and cause destruction.

Sis!

It instantly dawned on Lil that he could only be referring to Sis.

If this was the man they had seen killing the eagle-man, he might also have spotted them.

Just how good were the eyes of a lion?

Or, rather, of a lion- _man_?

And yet – if he also knew how she could wield her hair as a weapon, then he must have seen her again: and fighting, in action, too!

'You've seen her?' she blurted out, eager to hear anything about Sis that could lead to them meeting up once more.

He nodded, pointing the cold iron of the stick directly beneath her chin, making her lift her head up.

'She's dead,' he said bluntly, adding proudly, ' _I_ killed her!'

*

# Chapter 22

'That's not _possible_!' Lil protested, holding back the tears even though she found it hard to believe that Sis could be dead, that this lion-man had achieved what so many other men had failed to accomplish. 'She's _immortal_!'

The man stared down at Lil quizzically for a moment (he towered over her).

'I don't think you _are_ like her, are you?'

He let go of Lil's hair, drew pack the strange stick.

'Otherwise, why would you be here? How could you have been captured so easily?'

'Yes...yes,' Lil stammered uneasily, trembling as if abruptly remarkably cold. 'No...no one's like...like my friend.'

'A pity,' the king added. 'I regretted having to kill her; she could have been useful to us.'

'Then...then she really _is_ dead?'

Lil still found it impossible to believe that Sis could be dead; she had seemed indestructible.

_She_ was the one who did the destroying.

The king nodded. He sat back down on his cushioned throne, his look stern and unforgiving as Lil broke down, weeping at the loss of her friend.

'No _tears_ girl!' he growled, reaching towards a small shelf lying beneath the table, retrieving the book remnants and sliding them across the table towards Lil. 'Tell me about _this_!'

The loss of Sis caused Lil to suffer a complete flood of conflicting emotions, emotions she felt she had little control over; yet then she found – knowing that she _had_ to control them – that there was a vast rage of other emotions lying inside her that rushed to her aid.

'A _book_?' Lil said dismissively, responding to the king's question with a tone implying that she believed the book was little more than an ancient artefact of no real significance. 'Surely you've come across books as you've dug deep into the levels of the Golden Age?'

It took Lil a little by surprise that the king nodded in agreement. She hadn't really thought there could be that many books to discover, even when you were undertaking an operation of this size.

'More than we know what to do with,' the king said matter-of-factly. 'Most we sell on; we keep only those from which we can learn: those telling us of our history, of science.'

'Then why your interest in this _scrap_?' Lil asked, her tone more dismissive than ever.

' _Milton_ ,' the king said, tapping on the name with a mix of finger and claw. 'We have never come across a _book_ by this Milton!'

Lil was still puzzled: how would the author make a fragmentary book so much more important than all the other books they appeared to have found during their excavations?

Moreover, why did he seem so _uninterested_ in how Sis had come by her incredible powers?

Surely _that_ should be the focus of any interrogation of her?

'But...wasn't he just a _poet_?' Lil asked hesitantly. 'Doesn't that place his book amongst those you simply prefer to sell on?'

'You can _read_?' the king demanded.

Lil briefly wondered if she should lie – but then, what would be the lie, and what the truth?

She couldn't _really_ read.

She shook her head.

The king moaned in frustration.

He irately picked up the book, waving its fluttering, ragged pages close up by her face.

'Then all this is _meaningless_ to you?'

'It's an artefact of the Golden Age; so it must be worth something!' Lil answered with a deliberate air of naiveté.

'And your friend?' the king continued. 'Could _she_ read?'

Lil nodded, the tears returning.

The king ignored her distress.

'Did _she_ know what it referred to? Was it her book?'

'Yes, to both your questions,' Lil replied honestly, not wishing to tell any more lies about Sis than she had to. 'She thought it would lead her here: to _MassBay_.'

The king sank back into the luxurious padding of his throne with a long sigh of satisfaction.

'Of course,' he announced triumphantly. 'Off _course_!'

*

'Do you know what she hoped to find here?'

The king posed it as a question, yet going by his knowing smile, Lil presumed that he must be the one who knew the answer.

She shook her head.

She didn't want to tell a lie: but to admit that Sis had hoped to find the Devil here might be too dangerous for her.

'I think she thought she might be able to find the person here who could end all this suffering,' she said, thinking it quite apt that she had answered him with a hybrid of fact and lie.

The king nodded in elated satisfaction.

'Yes, yes! That is _indeed_ what she would have discovered here!'

He excitedly leapt up from his seat and, even more bizarrely, grasped Lil's hand in what passed for his own hand.

'Come, come with me,' he demanded not unkindly. ' _You_ must see this, if only so that you can see for yourself that your friend was _right_ : and if she _had_ made it here, she couldn't have arrived at a more _apt_ moment than this!'

*

# Chapter 23

As the king and Lil burst through the room's double doors, the two beasts who had taken up positions as guards in the corridor stared at them in bewilderment.

It must seem odd, Lil thought, to see their king being so suddenly and bizarrely familiar with her.

Why was that? she wondered: why _was_ he treating her so incredibly well?

There was his obvious admiration of Sis, of course. Yet it was surely more than just admiration: from what Lil had deduced from their conversation, it appeared that the king regarded Sis as a being in many ways similar to himself. In that case, it may will be that he also regarded her witnessing of his final combat and elevation to the kingship as a fortuitous – perhaps even a _god_ sent – confirmation of his right to rule.

They took the moving room once more, this time as a means of dropping them off on what Lil presumed must be a lower floor, going by the sensations that had struck her stomach. They next headed outside, but through different doors to the ones Lil had entered the building by, for they came out into an area where the atmosphere was one of jollity and ceremony rather than one of arduous tasks to be completed.

It differed, too, in that it was generally a simpler mix of beasts: of lions, bulls, bears and eagles. There were other creatures, but all of them were in servile roles, distributing drinks and food to their obvious superiors, who were undoubtedly here only to enjoy themselves.

The strangest thing about it all, however, was that a large number of unaltered humans were also mingling amongst this excited crowd, elatedly joining in the celebratory mood. Perhaps more remarkably still, they too were being offered food and drink by the more subservient 'servants of the gods'.

They could only be the leaders of the surrounding communities, Lil surmised.

Invited here in the same way that Frenda had explained, no doubt to witness some proof of the god's ultimate pre-eminence.

Quickly glancing about the jubilant throng, Lil couldn't see any sign of either Frenda or anyone else she might recognise from amongst Frenda's community.

Was Frenda still alive?

Was _anyone_ in her community still alive?

If the king and his warriors had killed Sis, had Frenda's community also taken the brunt of his fury?

She was abruptly aware that the air of festivity about her had being almost instantly stilled, replaced by a nervous shuffling, even a low, frightened moaning.

Everyone was facing her way, everyone was bowing low.

No; not bowing for _her_ , of course.

Bowing at the presence of their king.

There was surprise on the faces of everyone there, as if they hadn't expected the king to suddenly appear amongst them unannounced. Maybe, in his excitement to bring Lil down here, he had either forgone or even forgotten the usual protocols that had to be taken.

Lil bowed before the king, recognising that it would appear discourteous not to do so.

With an airy wave of a hand, the king dismissed his people's need to show their submissiveness. They rose to their feet once more, continuing their conversations, their feasting.

Some moved as if to greet or congratulate the king, but he once again dismissed their attention with yet another airy wave of a hand.

'What _do_ you know of your friend?' he asked at last, turning towards Lil. 'Anything: _anything_ you know – even things you might believe to be unimportant – you _must_ tell me!'

Lil shrugged; what _was_ there to say? She hadn't learnt as much about Sis as she would have liked to.

It was strange, this incredible interest the king had developed for Sis. The book, by comparison, had been left behind in his office, as if no longer of any interest to him.

'She _was_ different: completely different to anyone I've ever known, or I'm ever likely to know,' Lil admitted. 'She believed she _had_ to come here,' she added, realising that this was what he wanted to continue to hear; recognising, too, that it was this idea of Sis's quest, together with Lil's connection to Sis, that was keeping her alive, or at least ensuring that she wasn't yet being carted off to work in the mines.

Moreover, it was also allowing her to find out more about these 'servants of the gods', for she felt sure she was being privileged with information denied the vast majority of people.

The king nodded in satisfaction as he took in Lil's comment that Sis's quest to find this 'MassBay' had indeed been an important task for her.

'Yes, yes: _belief_ is the right word!' he declared elatedly. 'It's such a great shame that she didn't _announce_ herself to me! Instead of killing her, I would have taken great pleasure in _welcoming_ her here to see all this!'

He indicated the surrounding ceremonies with a gleefully expressive wave of an arm; then, abruptly, he whirled on Lil, staring at her quizzically, hopefully.

'You said she believed she would find the person here who could alleviate all our suffering?'

Lil nodded in agreement.

'And this suffering; do you know why it was all inflicted upon us in the first place?'

'It was the storms, the earthquakes – or so the legends tell us.'

The king smiled with satisfaction.

'Legends, yes; that's _all_ they are! For do they tell us how pointed – how incisively directed – those storms, those so-called naturally destructive elements, were?'

'They struck cities, laid everything to waste – there were so many of them, very little of the Golden Age was left intact. Whatever was left was soon covered in dust and soil blown by further storms. And then the jungle of forests began to spread all over it once more.'

'But, don't you see; it wasn't just indeterminate, as these ridiculous legends tell us! The disasters hit _only_ those areas populated by man! And hit those same areas again and again.'

Lil frowned quizzically at the king

'How could you possibly know this?'

The king beamed

'Because this is what we have been told: by the ever-resurrected god himself!'

*

'But how – _why_? Why would all these natural disasters be so carefully aimed at man alone?'

'Because we _deserved_ it, of course!'

As he answered Lil's query, the king raised his head slightly, as if catching signs that it was time for a change in the celebration's procedures. Placing an arm of sorts about Lil's shoulders, he began to lead her through a crowd that, naturally, smoothly parted for them as they approached.

'How could we _deserve_ to suffer so much?'

'Because we refused to believe; and so we received our just punishment, to correct our ways!'

He grinned down at Lil as he joyfully continued with his explanation.

'It was all for our _ultimate_ benefit, of course! If we learn to believe, then we have finally been completely cleansed of ours sins, our foolishness! We will be reborn, not as something standing _against_ nature, but as a _part_ of it!'

His chest puffed out proudly, an action Lil read as his way of presenting himself as an example of this new, superior breed of man.

Before Lil could ask for any form of clarification, there was shrill burst of horns, a beating of drums; and almost immediately, the crowd's chatter ceased as people turned to face in the very direction the king was headed. There was now only excited murmurs, the shuffling of feet, and even these were all being quickly stilled.

The sound of the drum was increasing, drawer nearer. A small procession of warriors were marching to its beat, warriors dressed in a style Lil didn't recognise, their cloaks a rich and expensive red, their armour highly polished, their helmets decorated with plumes.

They were humans, not bestial men.

In their midst was another man, one also wearing a cloak; yet he was bent torturously under the weight of a massive wooden cross.

*

# Chapter 24

If the man carrying the cross faltered in any way, one of the soldiers was standing close by to viciously whip his back until he struggled to his feet once more.

Lil wondered why everyone in the watching crowd was not only taking the infliction of such harsh punishment so lightly, but also seemed positively elated by it all. She hesitated, wondering if she should protest, or if, perhaps, she was confusing a theatrical event with reality.

She remained silent.

The king, observing her changing expressions, grinned in amusement.

'He has brought this upon himself: he has _chosen_ his role,' he explained almost joyfully. 'He is making a sacrifice of himself, to show us that which is true and undeniable!'

Once again, Lil grimaced in puzzlement.

'What's true?'

'Why,' the king replied with a hint of surprise that Lil hadn't already guessed, 'that _I_ am the King of Kings, of course!'

*

The tortured man's punishments only increased with each new development.

Reaching the pinnacle of a small hill, the cross was at last lifted from his back; only for him to be nailed spread-eagled across its beams, then raised up upon it as if it were some obscene tree.

The soldier who had been scourging the man now held in his hands a spear as he addressed the rapt audience.

'For all those who doubt!' he proclaimed accusingly: then forcibly rammed home the spear's elongated point into the crucified man's side, in such a manner that he must surely be penetrating deeply into the poor man's heart.

With a groan of agony, the tortured man was at last relieved of his suffering, dying in front of everyone, going limp upon the cross he was so securely pinioned to.

As his lifeless form was taken down, there was an invitation to any doubters within the crowd to step forward, to take this opportunity to slide their hands deep inside the man's wound – so that they would 'bare witness to the fact that he is surely dead'.

The procession moved off once again, this time carrying the dead man limply amongst them, in the same way that he had been forced to bear his own cross. This time, too, the crowd followed on behind the languidly moving procession as it wound its way towards yet another door, this one leading into yet another part of the extensive complex of buildings.

Here the poor man's dead body was reverently wrapped within a ghostly white shroud before being carefully laid to rest within a glass-topped casket.

And here he would lie 'for but a thrice', the commander of the warriors announced, guarded by us; yet anyone who still doubts, he added without any tone of admonishment, 'is free to stay and observe the miracle of the resurrection for themselves.'

*

The king wasn't a doubter.

He had more that he whished to show Lil. Besides, he reassured her, he would be notified when it was time to return.

They headed off for the moving room once more, taking it down to even lower levels.

No one seemed to find it peculiar that the king was spending his time showing a human around the complex rather than attending to any affairs of state, his odd conversations with what appeared to be some form of courtiers being brief and rare; perhaps this was a perfectly normal occurrence at the time of the celebrations, Lil presumed.

Another doubter, who must have the truth revealed to her.

'You said you were King of Kings,' Lil said as they descended in the moving room. 'Who are the other kings?'

'All dead, of course,' he answered, glancing at her with a hint of surprise that she hadn't already worked this out for herself. 'With _no_ chance of resurrection,' he added with a satisfied smirk.

'You saw one of the kings, saw me kill him,' he reminded Lil. 'Each group elects a king, and it is from those that the king of all must be chosen, by placing his life in the hands of the orders and decrees of our god.'

These lower areas of the building were more spartan than ever, yet it was a deliberately achieved simplicity for the sake of cleanliness, as everything sparkled as if freshly polished. Many of the rooms here were fronted by huge plates of glass, allowing a clear view of the interiors, where either beds were laid out in neat rows, or children were playing or taking part in what could be training exercises, ones of learning, of gymnastics.

Is this where the 'chosen' children ended up? Lil wondered. If so, perhaps the supposed religious ceremonies weren't such a terrible idea after all.

The king ignored these rooms. Instead, he directed Lil into one that bore similarities to the cleanly sharp mingling of steel and glass that had surrounded the casket in which the dead 'god' had been placed.

Here, however, there were a number of glass caskets, so many that instead of them gracing the very centre of the room – as the single casket had in the god's 'tomb' – they were here set along the walls, almost in a perfect replication of the dorms Lil had just viewed through the glass panes.

With a mischievous grin, the king led Lil over to the nearest casket.

As they drew nearer, Lil peered intently into the glass dome, recognising that a body already lay within the casket, trying to work out why the king thought she might be interested in seeing it.

She gasped in horror.

It was Sis.

The dead body of Sis had been serenely laid out within the glass casket.

*

# Chapter 25

A spark of hope abruptly surged through Lil.

'You can resurrect her?' she asked, whirling excitedly on the king. 'Like your god: you can bring her back to life?'

The king chuckled wickedly.

'I could have you flayed for blasphemy, you know that?' he said, observing her with a wry narrowing of his eyes.

He glanced about him, as if checking that no one else was around who might overhear him.

'I wish I _could_ ,' he said, quieter now, as well as being far more forlorn. 'But these chambers,' he continued, indicating the rows of caskets with a rising of his head, a sad casting of his eyes, 'they simply give a _wounded_ body a better chance of recovery; keeping temperatures low and, it seems, preventing the worst of infection.'

He stepped back a little, letting his voice rise as he intoned phrases that he didn't mind anyone overhearing.

'The god, our _dead_ god; he does _truly_ arise from death. He's placed in the glass casket merely so that he's clearly on view to any who insist on doubting, everything made plain to them; with no opportunity for fraud or changing of the dead for someone living.'

'Then...why place her _here_?'

Lil sensed the hope draining from her once more.

'Because I realised she was special; and by retrieving her body, I had hoped – no matter how vain that hope was – to find out more about her.' He turned to Lil, smiled. 'Of course, I didn't realise then that we already had you amongst us; a friend who could tell us what, unfortunately, her corpse is unable to tell us.'

As he spoke, the lid's glass casket opened with a breathy hiss.

Sis remained perfectly motionless; she was undoubtedly dead, Lil realised with sharp pangs of regret, of deepest loss.

Lil leant forward, giving Sis a first and last kiss on her cold cheek.

Four beasts filed into the room, wheeling before them some form of metallic stretcher.

Lil was lost for words, her mind a whirl as she tried to work out what must be happening.

Seeing the hurt and confusion on her face, the king placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

'I've given orders for her to be buried,' he said not unkindly.

*

As the beasts quietly, maybe even reverently, lifted Sis's limp body out of the casket and transferred it to the stretcher, Lil watched the whole unhurried operation with an intense foreboding: yes, Sis had been yet another, endlessly recurring catastrophe imposed on an already severely suffering humanity – and yet there had been a formidable sense of purpose about her, such that Lil had seriously begun to believe that this Memesis might be the saviour of man after all.

Despite the obvious care being afforded to Sis's lifeless body, Lil somehow felt that she was being profoundly disrespectful in witnessing the preparations for her immolation, a once supremely powerful being now brought so low that her body was being manhandled from casket to stretcher. Briefly, she glanced away, no longer wishing to see her friend being treated in this way.

Unintentionally, she caught glimpses of the surrounding caskets. These, too, were occupied. Yet instead of these being the bodies of injured warriors, as she might have supposed from the king's description of the caskets' remarkable capabilities, those encased beneath the glass lids seemed too small – too _childlike_.

Lil shuffled closer to one of the other caskets.

Yes, it was child who had been lain out in here.

One who was probably still alive, too, judging by the slight flickering of the eyes, the heavy rise and fall of the chest, the mist of moisture collecting on the glass just above the boy's nose and mouth. Alive despite the many, still half bloodied wounds and lacerations covering his entire body, many of which had apparently been crudely stitched.

Indeed, there was so little of the original child remaining, Lil was hard pressed to determine that he was in fact a boy.

For he was now more foal than human.

*

# Chapter 26

Eye's wide with a terrified dawning of understanding, Lil looked over towards the other nearby caskets.

This were also occupied by barely alive children going through the process of being transformed into bestial humans, their skin severed and spliced, or pulled back and stretched, all so it could undergo grafting with an equally split and lacerated animal.

Isn't that what Sis had identified when she had investigated the dead body of the eagle-king? That the grafting must have been undertaken at a very young age for it to have taken so reasonably successfully.

Of course: children couldn't work in the mines – at least not for too long, and they would have precious little arduous work to show for their deaths.

But a child blended with a beast of burden? How much harder could _they_ work?

Around her, she spotted a child who was now part mule, another who could have been a cow, while a third was blended with a goat.

On each casket, she also spotted something that she hadn't noticed before.

It was just one word.

_Milton_.

*

The king couldn't fail to observe Lil's rising air of distress.

'It isn't what you think...' he began to explain, drawing nearer.

'You're transforming them into–'

Lil fortunately stopped herself from continuing.

How wise would it be to use the word 'beasts" when the king was himself one of this new breed of man?

'Yes, transforming them into a new people more adapted to this new world!'

The king finished the sentence for her, but not in a way she would have preferred. He spoke proudly, too, almost with awe.

' _Adapted_?' Lil almost gagged on the word. 'Adapted for _slavery_? To work in your _mines_?'

The king gave a shrug of either indifference or, at best, an acceptance that there was no other choice.

'Only for now,' he said, 'while we recover what we can from the earlier age.'

Placing one of his immensely powerful arms about Lil, he quickly led her towards another casket, one in which the child had been grafted and merged with a bear cub: one of the elect, those chosen to rule over the lesser beasts.

'See,' the king declared proudly, pointing out how the transformation was already underway, 'we're also creating here the future race; a man blended with rather than fighting against the earth.'

With a tap of a finger, Lil indicated the word painted across the casket's glass.

'Milton: that's why you took an interest in the book I'd brought?'

The king nodded.

'It was the name of the project set up during the Golden Age to create this new, better generation of man. We thought its name had simply been taken from a place also called Milton just a day's hard walk from here, where the project seemed to have started from.'

'But now you also know that Milton's a man? But...this project could _still_ be named after this _place_ you mentioned; not this _man_.'

The king nodded in agreement once more.

'Yet what if the operation hadn't _started_ there, but had simply opened an offshoot at this Milton? If it's named after the man, _why_ would that be the case? What is it about his way of thinking that the project's originators believed so important that they named it after him? If we can find that out, it might give us further insights into what's expected of us.'

'But what of your god? Isn't _he_ the one who would know everything?'

This time, the king shook his head.

'As the testimonies tell us: it is Milton who _gave_ us our god!'

*

# Chapter 27

Once more, Lil was interrupted before she could ask any further questions, a bull-man entering the chamber to inform the king that it was time to attend the 'resurrection at the tomb'.

The king responded with what could have been the beginnings of a leap of delight, reaching out for Lil's hand to ensure she followed after him: but his hand grasped nothing but empty air. He looked back in surprise to see that Lil was hanging back, her face creased with dismay and bewilderment.

'You must see this–'

'No, no, I can't!' Lil insisted vehemently, glancing nervously about the room as she realised that Sis's body had been removed without her knowing. 'I must find Sis!'

She had been so unforgivingly engrossed in the hybrid transformations taking place within the caskets that she hadn't even heard, let alone seen, Sis's pall bearers wheel her away.

She moved towards the door, but her intention wasn't to accompany the king; rather, she was hoping to determine where Sis's body had been taken, for she wanted to accompany her friend on this last journey on earth.

The king reached out a powerfully muscled arm, preventing Lil from rushing down the corridor.

'She's dead,' he said bluntly. 'You're interest now should only be in the living; indeed, with the god who is no longer dead!'

'But Sis–'

'Can be honoured by you shortly, for the _confirmation of my kingship_ by our god will take little more than a few moments!'

The way he fiercely emphasised that this was the way his kingship would be ratified brooked no argument from Lil.

With bowed head, Lil acquiesced to his demand, following morosely after him down the long, stark corridors leading back to the tomb.

*

The 'tomb' was already crowded.

The king was escorted through the crowd, Lil accompanying him to the front, where they both had a clear view of the glass casket.

The guards still surrounded the casket, but they were now all staring intently at what was happening beneath the transparent case; for the shrouded figure was moving, if only slightly, and slowly.

The movements, however, were increasing in both speed and breadth of their actions.

On their way here, Lil had managed to at last persuade the king to clarify his apparent declaration that their god had been created by Milton.

'How can a god formed here on earth be someone we should listen to?' Lil had protested. 'That makes no sense at all!'

'Formed here on earth only in that he's made _manifest_ here!' the king had snapped back as he hurried along the corridors, for fear of missing any scene of the resurrection. 'Brought down from the heavens so that we may see him in his _true_ image: for of course, his creation doesn't just include _man_ but also all the other, wildly varied creatures that had once been unfairly incarcerated in a zoo near here.'

Before them now, the glass lid rose with the same breath-like sigh that had accompanied the opening of Sis's casket.

Yet unlike Sis, the body encased in this casket was now far from motionless.

The layers of shroud were beginning to be carelessly cast aside.

A great many in the crowd gasped in a mingling of terror and awe as the shrouded body sat up in the casket.

On the orders of the guard's commander, a small number of the soldiers stepped forward to help lift the shrouded figure from the casket, while another two of them quickly tore and cut away at the shrouded folds encasing the feet.

Even as the tightly swathed body was reverently placed upright on his feet upon the floor, a great deal of the shroud was already falling aside, the guards helping to remove the layers as they fell about the figure now being ever-so swiftly revealed.

It was a man who still bore the signs of a wound to his chest, even though it was now almost fully healed, like the injuries to his hands and feet that were now little more than purple blemishes.

He looked to Lil to be a very similar man to the one she had seen raised upon the cross, his slim, bony build being exactly the same: but naturally, there was now a vast difference to the man standing alive before them, for he was chiefly formed of the major parts of a lion.

*

# Chapter 28

A heavenly music played, as if coming directly from the heavens themselves, for Lil could see no one around the room who could be singing it.

The crowd cheered or gasped in sheer wonderment, the latter formed purely from the humans attending, who had obviously witnessed nothing in any way similar to this before.

Lil was expecting the guard's commander to invite any doubters to step forward and inspect the risen god – for that, of course, was how Frenda had seemed to describe the procedures – but instead the king himself reverently approached, kneeling before this lion-man who looked so much like himself.

The lion-god placed what passed for his two hands upon the king's bowed head.

When he spoke, his voice was booming and powerful.

'As through the right and the fixed laws of heaven, and the orders bright, I decree that you be exalted to such power as our princes, and hereby prevent all reply and opinion ranged against you; for you are answerable only to me.'

As he intoned the rite, he raised a hand to take down from his own head the strange crown that he had worn while carrying his cross, one of thorns rather than of gold, of berries rather than rubies.

He placed this now upon the head of the king, a sign for the newly-crowned ruler to rise to his feet and turn to his exuberantly rejoicing people.

The most nervous of the people the king stepped back amongst were those who hesitated as they prepared to slap him triumphantly upon his back, then thought better of it. No doubt, Lil reasoned, these were old friends of the new king who now recognised that everything had changed between them.

The commander of the guard had now invited any doubters to step forward towards the risen god, to check for themselves that this was indeed the same man they had seen flagellated, crucified and killed: but there were few doubters left amongst the crowd, with even the single man who stepped forward seemingly doing so only because he wished to draw closer to his god.

The loud crack, the sound of a tree split asunder in a storm, reverberated around what was, after all, a relatively small room.

There was a brief shocked silence, then cries of horror.

The lion god pitched forward, a large hole in the middle of his head streaming with fresh blood.

*

'So much for your resurrected god!' Sis scoffed, contemptuously tossing aside the strange stick that spat small arrows.

*

# Chapter 29

'Sis!'

Lil ecstatically ran towards her friend, finding it hard to believe – despite everything she knew about Sis! – that she was back, that she was alive.

Sis's hair sprang out towards Lil, the strands instantly curling about her waist, hoisting her high as if about to dash her to the ground. The hair still smelt of, was still ingrained with, the soil that Sis had only recently been buried in.

Had this burial turned Sis against her?

The whole crowd, of course, was against Sis: like a wave in a great storm, it turned and surged forward towards her.

Sis remained where she was.

Her hair once again whipped out everywhere about her, spreading like a rapidly growing, alien ivy. It tore off heads, pulled whole bodies apart, sliced and severed, speared and skewered.

And, Lil realised with relief, she was being cradled safely above it all.

Magical sticks cracked, this time aimed directly at Sis. But her body absorbed then instantly rejected the crude missiles, spitting them out nonchalantly. Her armour was already slipping into place everywhere about her, transforming her into a glistening jewel of sapphire and emerald.

The soldiers in their strange armour hacked uselessly at the tendrils of hair with their heavy swords. The steel plates of armour rippled noisily as their wearers died.

Sis left alone those hysterically weeping over the death of their god, including the king.

*

'You were dead; I _saw_ you!'

To keep us with Sis's faster pace, Lil had to break into a trot now that she had been safely lowered to the ground.

'You saw and believed in the resurrection of their god: so why do you need an explanation from me?'

'Because...you're my friend: not my god.'

As they walked, the resistance to their passage was sporadic, lacking any coordination now that they were far outside the complex. Even so, as if it were an army of irresistible serpents, Sis's hair continued to strike out at anything that might present any danger to them.

Now the writhing hair pulled apart whole structures, ripped asunder large machines, the sparking of electricity, the spilling of fuel, causing explosions and fires to add to this scene of complete mayhem.

No, not _complete_ mayhem: for Memesis walked through it all as if out for a stroll.

'Then as a friend, I ask you to wait a little longer for explanations; I have an urgent appointment to keep.'

'Appointment?'

Lil was so shocked she briefly halted before having to push herself into yet another quick trot.

'With the _Devil_?' she asked incredulously, recalling Sis's original intention to search for and defeat the person she held responsible for man's cruelty. 'Sis, this _isn't_ Naseby! We have to rescue the _children_ who–'

'I _know_ that he's here: I can _feel_ that he's here,' Sis insisted.

'It's _not_ Naseby!' a frustrated Lil persisted 'It's a place called _MassBay_ : short for Massachusetts Bay!'

Sis ignored her, striding on across the tumbled landscape of overgrown ruins.

'My _mother_ says it's here: the place where it all ends!'

*

# Chapter 30

'You're mother?'

Lil was more taken aback than ever.

'You never mentioned your mother: I never knew you _had_ a mother!'

'Just because we're friends doesn't mean you know _everything_ about me.'

'I don't know _anything_ about you!'

'Then there you are; don't presume I don't have a mother.'

'Okay, okay; but, then you never said that you still _knew_ your mother!'

'That's what all this is about,' Sis replied bluntly, indicating the heavily scarred landscape surrounding them. 'She's hurting badly; she's been hurting badly for too long – and all _this_ is the reason, I see that _now_.'

She glanced over her shoulder, briefly taking in the wrecked and burning complex.

'The power being used here, it's not _all_ recovered materials,' Sis continued, purposely striding out across the rolling earth once more. ' _That's_ why Mother's still hurting, why the drills are still probing so, so deeply into her!'

'The _earth_?' Lil asked uncertainly, trying to work out what Sis might mean by her apparently increasingly crazed declarations. 'You're saying the _earth_ is your mother?'

Even as she asked the question, Lil remained unsure if even she herself was speaking metaphorically or not.

'I'd lost my connection with her, my _close_ connection, don't you see?' Sis stated assuredly. 'Mother knows now that it all comes back only to _here_ , all those power lines, so deep underground: that's why she's been leading me here along.'

She halted abruptly.

She pointed, out towards a lone, dark figure languidly making his way towards them across the barren land.

'See, he's _here_!' she hissed. 'The Devil!'

*

# Chapter 31

Lil stared at the approaching figure, assuming that there could only be some mistake; this _couldn't_ be the _Devil_!

He was dressed all in black. He wore a strange, equally back hat, one that sat tightly across the top of his head and added to what appeared to be an already impressive height.

He carried a stick, one he used to tap the ground and rocks before him, as if blind.

Sis cried out to him.

'Tell me: are you the Devil?'

The oncoming man chuckled gruffly.

'Indeed, I _have_ referred to myself as such!'

*

As the dark figure drew closer, he looked less like a devil and more like a strangely garbed if incredibly slender man.

He even smiled a little as he tipped his strange, tall hat in greeting.

Despite the presence of his stick, he did not appear to be blind after all.

He frowned as he observed the looks of displeasure on the two girls.

'Oh dear – I would hope I don't really have the _appearance_ of the Devil, my dears! I _was_ speaking only in terms of my _work_.'

'Then why did you say you _were_ the Devil?' demanded Lil.

'The overthrowing of a king necessitates placing yourself in a dilemma of your own making: how is that you yourself are not so easily overthrown unless you take on for yourself all the god-granted majesty he had unjustly claimed for himself?'

'The king who was supported by the Devil?' Sis asked, curiously observing this unexpectedly polite man. ' _You_ overthrew him?'

' _Helped_ only: but yes, I thoroughly supported his usurpation. But then found that one devil is merely replaced by another, for that seems to be the nature of kingship.'

' _Milton_?' Lil eyed him doubtfully. 'You're _John_ _Milton_?'

'Of course,' he replied with a grin, once again gallantly tipping the hat he had replaced back on his head.

'But...you're dead!' Sis blurted out in uncharacteristic bewilderment.

'And so were _you_ , my dear,' Milton replied jovially. 'So were _you_!'

*

# Chapter 32

'In the book...it said you were _blind_.'

Lil glanced at the stick the man had originally seemed to need as he had first approached.

'Ah, yes: the _book_!' Milton said brightly. Glancing at the stick he held, almost as if suddenly made aware of it, he added every bit as light heartedly, 'And yes – the stick too. Not that I need it anymore of course; just force of habit, tapping it away so noisily in front of me like that!'

'Then you _were_ blind; but now you're _not_ ,' Sis stated in a way that proclaimed she was expecting a more detailed answer than the one already given.

'It's hardly a condition I would wish to be resurrected with, is it my dear?'

'Resurrected? So you've also...been _reborn_?'

Milton glanced happily about him, lifting his head as he luxuriated in breathing in the air.

'Yes, yes: marvellous, isn't it? Of course, I always believed it _must_ be possible – but it is _so_ gratifying to see that it is, indeed, possible! – if only, unfortunately for just a chosen few of us: and probably briefly at that, I now suspect.'

'Do you _have_ to talk in endless riddles?' Sis demanded, more exhausted by Milton's avoidance of direct answers than any fight she might have been expecting.

'Surely you can't expect _everything_ to be explained in nothing but a few, sparse sentences? Let's start – let's go _back_ to – my _book_ : the one you mentioned. For that, of course, is the _reason_ for my rebirth. And so I must naturally thank you for bringing it back to everyone's attention!'

'They didn't realise you were a real person,' said Lil, recalling the king's explanation for their interest in the book. 'They thought this project had been simply named after a place.'

Milton nodded.

'It seems the creators of this endeavour knew they were playing god; perhaps even usurping his divined order – granting ourselves the right to pull down even heaven itself!'

'But the gods: what would be _their_ response to this rebellion against nature?' Sis asked expressionlessly.

Milton observed her with a wry grin.

'Well, as we _know_ ; that is where _you_ come in, isn't it my dear?'

*

'Me?'

Sis appeared to be genuinely surprised by Milton's mildly delivered accusation.

'I didn't know _anything_ bout this "project"!' she insisted vehemently.

'Ah, but your _mother_ , now,' Milton said, ' _she_ began to see the connections to this great scheme of man's, didn't she?'

'Not at first: then there were _so_ many uncountable lines of power that man had buried beneath my mother's skin. She knew only that she was dying. Yet worst of all was the deepest drilling, aiming for her heart – and yet that drilling continued even when man had been brought so low he no longer had any need for such power.'

'And so _you_ were brought to life by your mother, correct? To be a more precise instrument of destruction?'

Sis gave a nod in response to Milton's declaration.

'Man has his antibodies to fight disease: Mother needed hers.'

'And so your mother took a seed from an apple that had fallen from one of her dying trees: and from that seed there sprouted a daughter of the elements who would take up her scourge and avenge her.'

Lil stared disbelievingly at Sis.

Was Milton seriously claiming that she wasn't flesh and blood? That she was something other, maybe even plant-like?

If that was the case, no wonder Sis had been reborn once she had been buried in the earth, her mother.

There was a sudden snorting, a disturbance of rocks and rubble, over to their right.

Lil stared in horror. A gigantic serpent was rapidly making its way towards them, one that glittered entirely black as it snaked its way between and across the surrounding hillocks

'Ah, the serpent is here, 'Milton said calmly.

*

# Chapter 33

The monster slowed then stopped right by them, giving a final snort of smoke, of roaring flames.

Its eyes glowed, the illumination of a bright light deep inside them

And within that eye, Lil saw a man.

This time, it wasn't a bear-man, as she had seen within the eye of the dragon. It was a man free of any animal metamorphosis.

It was, in fact, a man she recognised.

For it was the man she had witnessed being tortured, raised upon his cross, and speared.

A man she had already seen killed twice.

*

Just below the eye, a part of the serpent's scaly side shivered, then slid aside.

It was a door, revealing the metallic interior. A man stepped out, the same man: tall, handsome, bearded and with long, flowing hair.

And yet this same man was still standing by the eye-like window.

They could have been twins; only then a third and even a fourth man stepped out of the serpent's insides, all of them differing in no way that Lil could see.

Sis apparently saw no need to fear them, for her armour had vanished once more, replaced now by a silken gown of butterfly-wings.

'You can all come with us,' one of the men stated kindly. 'And everything will be explained.'

*

The 'serpent' slithered unusually quickly over the difficult terrain. The many wheels of each linked carriage were tracked with metal plates that effortlessly crushed any object seeking to cause an obstacle to its progress.

It took them – Sis, Lil and Milton – towards yet another remarkably intact building excavated from the many layers of soil that had subsumed the Golden Age.

'Clones,' Milton explained, noting the confusion on Lil's face as she took in that everybody aboard this train looked exactly the same. 'Taking a small part of a man or animal, you can replicate him many times, perhaps even blending them together if you're skilled enough; or even, as in my case, bring someone long dead back to life.'

'But why?' Lil asked. 'Why would anyone need to replicate the same man over and over? How is that an _improvement_?'

'And why this _particular_ man?' Sis added.

'The _improvement_ was sought through collecting the biological plans – the DNA – of famous people and their descendants: for it was discovered that this DNA was not only a memory of the _physical_ person, but also stored their every thought, their every idea! Think how wonderful it would be to access the thoughts of people long dead! Unfortunately, my own memories lay languishing in this great library until your book set in motion a search.'

'But why _this_ man,' Lil asked, repeating Sis's question once again as she nodded towards the clones efficiently going about their business within the train's interior. 'Why repeat _him_?'

'We are all connected, in our way, linking back to our _own_ mother, who is naturally attuned to the vibrations of our DNA: yet even she finds it easier to establish that contact through a mind whose workings she has become used and attuned to.'

'Your _mother_?'

Sis sounded incredulous.

'Yes, yes, of course; who else do you think you are about to meet? We _all_ have a mother, my dear!'

*

# Chapter 34

The room was like nothing Lil had ever seen before; massive, soaring, perfectly circular, and yet completely bare save for a single chair, in which a woman was seated. An impossibly beautiful woman, with luxuriantly flowing jet-black hair.

When Lil, Sis and Milton were politely shown into the room, the woman rose only briefly from her chair to offer them a warm greeting.

'Welcome to you both, girls: I am indeed especially privileged to have Earth's daughter as my guest.'

She didn't extend a hand as part of that welcoming however, instead slipping back into her chair, using a hand movement only to invite the three of them to take one of three chairs that rose from the floor before her in a partial semi-circle.

'I take it you don't mind my son being here?' she asked, indicating the far older looking Milton with a slight movement of her head.

She crossed her legs as she clasped her hands before her in a thoughtful gesture.

'I sent him to you,' she continued, yet looking now purely towards Sis, 'once I had raised him: for I had seen – for I have many eyes around my complex, while I learned much about you as you lay within the chamber – that you sought greater knowledge about us. And naturally, I appreciated your quest, for I too wished to learn more about you: and so I ensured that you were returned to your mother, so she could breathe life back into you.'

'Thank you,' Sis replied with a grateful bowing of her head. 'I suppose then, in a way, that I owe you my life.'

'Indeed you do,' the woman replied bluntly with only the merest hint of a smile. 'But how could I turn down this opportunity to learn more of what I had witnessed for myself in so many great minds that I had briefly brought back to life: a belief than man should embrace, become a _part_ of nature, rather than relentlessly pitching himself forever against it!'

' _Briefly_ back to life?'

Lil glanced worriedly towards Milton, who responded only with a resigned shrug.

'Of course,' the woman replied starkly. 'My role is only to accumulate the _wisdom_ of the ancients; not to grant them a new life they are in no way entitled to! We we're challenging god's order enough here without completely bringing back to life those whose had lived long ago.'

'And yet: all these clones, of this same man,' Sis retorted. 'You've given _him_ a multiple array of new lives!'

The woman shrugged off the accusations nonchalantly.

'As the men who serviced me died, I needed someone to help me maintain my purpose, my role in life: and so I used my capabilities to create someone who I knew would also be able to rally the remaining humans to support me and understand why their _embracement_ of nature must be made. And even the wisest amongst men were telling me they had adhered to a belief in this ever-risen god!'

'Yet he's _not_ a god, is he?' Sis declared with a stern glare.

On the way to this room, to this place somehow dominated by this impossibly placid woman, Milton had explained that the raising of the hybrid god wasn't – as they might expect – achieved by the simple replacement of another clone.

The man they saw tortured and crucified had indeed died, had indeed being lacerated to a point where his skin wept blood: and this was all so that when he was placed in the cloning chamber with a carefully selected strand of animal DNA, he would be re-cloned as this animal god.

And the clone's reward for undergoing all this? The fulfilment of the animalistic urge to have a mate, granted to him when he was later allowed to mingle amongst the 'servants of the gods'.

The woman waved protestation aside as if it mattered not a jot to her that this man was no real god.

'Naturally, despite the truly remarkable achievements of these collectors of ancient DNA, this one remained beyond even their capabilities: and so I resorted instead to utilising this god's appointed representative on Earth.'

With a wave of a hand, a section of the wall appeared to vanish and reveal the raising of the tortured man once more; and yet, Lil suddenly realised, it wasn't a natural view of the scene after all, for the viewpoint kept changing, so that at one point she felt that she was looking down upon the soldiers from the cross itself.

'A man who's re-enactment of the god's passion was captured in what was then called a movie – one shown and believed throughout the world,' the woman continued, noting Lil's amazement at what she was seeing, inviting her to step closer with yet another airy wave. 'It gave me the basis for its own replication, using similar garments discovered in a building housing the most ancient of artefacts – and from which, in fact, we obtained my son's clothes.'

She smiled at Milton, if a little grimly. Not that Lil noticed, for she was staring intently at the wall, finding it hard to believe that what she was seeing there wasn't real.

Then, suddenly, it _was_ real.

A group of the soldiers both reached and stepped out from the wall, surrounding and grabbing hold of Lil in an instant.

A sharp blade was held at her throat: she couldn't struggle free.

'Ah, my own little innovation of an old technology,' the woman smirked triumphantly.

*

# Chapter 35

Sis's hair snaked out across the room – only to whip uselessly through what was nothing more than an ultra-realistic image of the woman.

The woman wasn't really there, Lil realised with dismay. It was just some technical version of a mirage.

'Don't worry, my dears,' the woman chortled. 'I don't mean you any harm!'

Even Milton appeared shocked by everything that was happening. Yet as he moved as if to protest, he too was surrounded and firmly held by soldiers who stepped out of the wall of moving images.

The woman ignored his protestations that this wasn't anything like he'd been led to believe would happen.

'All I require of you is that you lie once more in one of my chambers,' she said gently to Sis, 'but this time while alive, naturally: allowing me full access to your particular knowledge of nature!'

'No, Sis!'

Lil fruitlessly squirmed within the tight hold of the soldiers.

'We know that once she's absorbed all the knowledge she needs, she's done with the person!'

'You told me you simply wanted to promise her that you'd limit the drilling!' Milton insisted, as if in some way agreeing that Sis was placing herself in danger if she acquiesced to the woman's demands. 'That you were only accessing the energy of the movements of the earth's plates!'

'I was drilling to find out more about this earth, about nature!' the woman spat back scornfully. 'But now I have her _daughter_ here, I don't need to drill so _deeply_ anymore: so I wasn't _lying_!'

Sis had also been enveloped by a large force of heavily armed soldiers, but these held back edgily, wary of approaching her too closely.

With a forlorn nod, Sis acquiesced to the woman's demands; and at last the soldiers drew closer, taking her firmly by the arms.

'No Sis, no!' Lil wailed, struggling uselessly once more in the firm hold of her own guardians. 'Why are you giving in so easily?'

'Don't you understand, dear?' the woman sneered at the distraught Lil as Sis was led away. ' _You've_ tamed her.'

*

The image of the woman vanished.

'All _trickery_ , Milton moaned as the guards left the room, locking the door behind them. 'And _I_ helped her _entrap_ you here!'

Sis shook her head miserably.

'No, no: it's not _your_ fault – it's _mine_! Didn't you hear her? She's right: I _have_ calmed Sis – made her useless!'

Approaching her, his face strained, Milton placed a consoling arm around her shoulder.

'How can _you_ have possibly made her useless? It's completely the other way around: she was nothing as long as she was free of emotion. Without our emotions, _we're_ nothing – how can we respond adequately and correctly to our fellows if we have no feelings, no empathy, for them? They become nothing but objects in our eyes: and we ourselves are thereby lessened.'

He suddenly, surprisingly, stood back from Lil, as if jerking back in shock. He raised his arm a little, observing it as if expecting it to have changed into something unexpected, unwanted.

He glanced back at Lil, his eyes wide with disbelief, his mouth almost gawping wide.

'But you're...'

'You're _what_?' Lil repeated nervously.

'You...can your remember your parents?'

Lil frowned irritably: it was such an unusual question to ask in such hopeless circumstances.

'Why, no; not really,' she nonetheless admitted. 'It's so so long ago – I'm not sure if they're still alive or not.'

'But your birth...I sensed it then, when I embraced you...'

'Sensed my birth? How could you possibly do that?' Lil snapped more aggressively than she'd intended.

She could remember how Milton had also somehow been able to recall Sis's birth (from a helpless seed of all things!); maybe this was some special attribute he'd been gifted by this odious 'mother' of his. She seemed more than capable of granting powers beyond any normal human understanding.

'It was a rush of waves,' Milton explained, 'wave after powerful wave, foaming in their strength: casting you ashore.'

Lil chuckled nervously.

'No, no; I can assure you, I'm _nothing_ to do with nature!'

'Oh, but _aren't_ you?' Milton replied mysteriously. 'The nature of _man_ ,' he added. 'For these weren't waves of water, but of something far, far stronger; for they were waves of _emotion_!'

*

# Chapter 36

'This is crazy!' Lil exclaimed angrily. 'How can I be formed from waves of _emotions_? It's _impossible_!'

'No no; it's not so ridiculous at all!' Milton assured her. 'You see Mother – sorry, I can't really think of any other way to describe someone who has given me life once more – she's been accumulating all this wisdom, all this reason; but the _emotions_ of all these people, she's just seen as being redundant, discardable!'

'You can't even _discard_ something that doesn't really _exist_!'

'How can you say it doesn't exist? Think of the love a mother has for a child: how more powerful than even _reason_ is that link between them? Yes, yes – I admit it seems in all other ways intangible to us: but then, isn't reason, isn't wisdom?'

'But reason, wisdom; they're completely _different_ things!'

'Are they? Yet if we don't care for others, they're _meaningless_ to us – they might as well not exist! It's the _emotions_ that are the _real_ existence! And just as Earth fought back with the creation of her daughter Memesis, man fought back with _your_ creation: the emotions Memesis needed to calm her!'

Frustrated, confused, Lil tried to bring Milton back to a more reasonable way of thinking by attempting to calm him.

'Look, look – even if any of all this is even halfway true; what _good_ does it do us?'

'Mother has it all _wrong_! _That's_ how it helps us! How can she say she knows everything – that she's a newly arisen god, which I now realise she's striving for – if she has no knowledge of emotions, the prime basis of _human_ nature!'

There suddenly came from everywhere about them a sound of rapid tapping. It was a regular rhythm, one that was swiftly growing in both intensity and the number of overlapping beats.

Clapping; it was the sound of a swiftly multiplying crowd clapping. As if Lil and Milton were being unnervingly watched by a vast, ethereal audience.

It was now raucous clapping, quickly becoming evermore painful to listen to. First Milton and then Lil covered their ears with their hands, grimacing in agony as this failed to stem the now thunderous drumming from penetrating so deeply into them.

Abruptly, the enveloping walls burst into life and colour, revealing a gigantic, possibly endless crowd.

And every one of them was Mother.

*

The clapping was now storm-like in its intensity.

Both Milton and Lil collapsed to the floor, vainly attempting to mute the noise by clasping their hands ever tighter about their ears.

From the audience, first a much larger then a rapidly looming figure of Mother appeared, looking down on them as if they were little more than obnoxious insects.

'I'm glad I resurrected you, Milton!' she boomed. 'It's gratifying to see that even a human mind can sometimes grasp the unbelievable and realise its truth. But now; you're time is over.

She clicked a pair of gigantic fingers, the vibrations reverberating around the room as if they had set in motion a hurricane.

Milton shook, shrieked in utmost pain.

Then, with a petrified upturning of his eyes, he rolled over and died.

*

# Chapter 37

Despite the rolling thunder of endless clapping, Lil rushed to Milton's side, clinging on to the vain hope that he might not yet be dead.

But even as she knelt down beside him, she recognised that there was no hope for him. He was dead, dead once more.

She was weeping still as, at last, the tumultuous clapping came to an abrupt end. With its disappearance, the gloating image of Mother also instantaneously vanished.

Without any need for the opening of any door, one of the more life-size images of Mother stepped out from the wall. Striding across the room towards the crouched Lil, her walk was controlled and precise, well practised, even surprisingly stilted.

'There there, my dear;' she declared in a manner lacking any true emotion. 'We both know he was lucky to have this chance, however brief, of resurrection.'

'Why did you kill him?' Lil demanded furiously, glaring up at the arrogant woman so coolly observing her.

'I brought him into life,' Mother declared casually. 'I sent him back.'

'And this is what you intend for Sis?' Lil snorted accusingly. 'Once you have what you want from her, once you're a "god"?'

'Your friend's disposable will require a little more ingenuity, I'm sure: my own creations, the one whose cells I set vibrating with life once more – well, all I have to do with _those_ is _change_ the vibrations.'

'You can't be a god without being aware of man's emotions; didn't you hear Milton say that?'

She nodded sagely.

'He was wise, very wise: and, naturally, perfectly accurate in his estimation of what constitutes godliness.'

Lil unsteadily rose to her feet.

'Then...' she began hesitantly, 'you admit you've failed? That you can't be god, that you can't create a whole new breed of man if you don't understand their emotions? We're _nothing_ , he said, if we have no emotions!'

Mother appeared shocked, yet it was an expression so exaggerated that it was almost theatrical.

'No emotions?' she said, her voice full of the very same enhanced theatricality. 'But why, here _you_ are, my dear! A veritable _tsunami_ of emotions!'

'That's ridiculous! In that, the poor man made no sense at all!'

Mother placed a consoling arm around the angrily quivering Lil in exactly the same way that Milton had.

'Not at all, not at all,' Mother pouted, as if hurt. 'I regard you as my very _finest_ creation!'

*

# Chapter 38

Lil stepped away from Mother, horrified.

'Me? _Your_ creation?'

She shook her head vehemently.

'No, no, no! That's madder than _anything_ I've heard so far!'

She glared fiercely at Mother.

'I don't _know_ you! I never even knew of this _place_ till I arrived here!'

She gave an airily dismiss wave of her arm to indicate the towering room surrounding them.

Mother rewarded her with yet another hurt pout.

'But of _course_ you don't recognise all this, dear! It was all rather a little _too_ poetic for my personal tastes but – to give him his due – our dear, poor Milton was simply struggling for the right words to describe a science beyond his own limited understanding. But then, even within this erroneously called Golden Age, they struggled to understand that what they had termed Dark Matter – this intangible _thing_ that made up so much of creation's mass – was really the heaviness of emotion's they all carried around endlessly within them.'

'I came here with _Sis_!' Lil persisted. 'I helped her find...'

She faded to silence.

Yes, she had helped Sis arrive here, hadn't she?

And wasn't that what Mother had wanted? To entrap Sis, to gain her knowledge of nature?

What had Mother said earlier, too?

That Lil was responsible for Sis's humility. For her weakening, her _taming_.

Mother grinned, seeing the light of understanding in Lil's eyes.

'When I heard all these tales of this Memesis,' she said merrily, 'I knew she _had_ to be Earth's daughter!'

Her smile vanished, her expression now both stern yet undeniably sad.

'But now my dear, I suppose even _your_ use is over.'

And as Mother clicked her fingers, Lil was rocked by the most powerful trembling she had ever experienced.

*

# Chapter 39

The room itself was pulsating.

It's walls were a blaze of fire, of explosions.

And, just as the soldiers had stepped forth from what had been moving images, pieces of those walls now crumbled, plummeting to the ground and shattering into even smaller chunks.

'What's happening?'

Lil would have like to scream that out herself. Yet it wasn't her who had shrieked out in bewilderment; it was Mother.

Like Lil, she was gawping in confusion at this mass of terrible images decorating the walls.

Images of the entrance to the mines crumbling, the rocks falling upon the bestial guards, the slaves breaking free and running for their lives.

Images of the complex Lil had seen earlier, the rooms cracking open, the once captive children fleeing.

Only the room of infant hybrids seemed unaffected by this chaos of earthquakes, of floods and fires, the children being left to sleep on.

Everything was under attack, Lil swiftly reasoned, these images somehow beamed here, perhaps from the 'many eyes' Mother had boasted of.

Now those eyes revealed to her only that her realm was crumbling.

'Earth! _She's_ attacking me?' Mother wailed in irate frustration.

The locked door quivered, the quaking structure above it crumbling, tumbling; it jerked wildly of its hinges, briefly flying up into the air.

This time, it was Memesis who stepped into the room.

*

Mother reacted with incredible swiftness.

She grabbed hold of Lil, placing her in a strangling headlock. It was an amazingly powerful grip, such that Lil felt for sure that Mother could easily tear her head off.

'Your friend's life is still in danger,' Mother pointed out to Sis, ensuring she was aware of the fear in Lil's eyes. 'I cant understand why you've put her at risk like this!'

Sis appeared to be carefully summing up the situation as she replied.

'I've learned a great deal from Lil,' Sis admitted, 'and so I know she would not expect me to put her life above the lives of all these other children.'

'She would _sacrifice_ herself, you mean?' Mother chuckled grimly. 'Very noble, I'm sure; but are _you_ really so sure you know your friend? You came seeking the _Devil_ , remember? And yet you failed to realise you've been with _her_ all along!'

*

# Chapter 40

'Tell him what you _really_ are, dear,' Mother scoffed, jerking her arm tighter, threatening to wrench Lil's head clear of her shoulders.

'I...I don't know what she means, Sis!' Lil gasped desperately. 'She _said_ I'm this sort of being made up of emotions: but not the Devil, Sis! Not the _Devil_!'

'That's right, that's right,' Mother agreed with clipped satisfaction. 'But what are man's _overriding_ emotions?'

'Greed,' Sis answered assuredly. 'Cruelty. Arrogance. Belligerence. I could go on.'

'Exactly, exactly!' Mother blurted out triumphantly. 'And isn't it these emotions that truly make man himself the Devil; for we all know, don't we, that there really is no such person as the _Devil_? He's nothing more than an excuse conjured up by man!'

'So – if the _summation_ of all those emotions is destroyed,' Sis replied, as if carefully considering this, 'then man is no _longer_ evil?'

' _Precisely_ ,' Mother snorted, stepping away from Lil as a furious Sis advanced upon her.

*

# Chapter 41

Sis's hair lashed out before her.

It whipped through the air, serpentine in its motion, cobra-like in the deadliness of its strike.

Mother's head whirled up into the air, the severed neck sparking, its wires trailing like so many useless tendrils. The body, however, wasn't completely devoid of its brain, for androids aren't built wholly like humans.

It launched itself at Sis.

'Fool!' the voice continued to hiss from the severed head. 'I'm the culmination of all of man's achievements, all his understanding; I was chosen to be the "human face" of what would be the rebirth of man! And _you_ seek to destroy _me_?'

Sis's hair snapped once again, and again, each strand now cutting deeply into the fake skin, the hard metal under-structure. Individual hairs pierced deeply, confusing electronic chips, setting them on a course of ever-vibrating self-destruction; machine separating from human and animal substance, a spilling of oil and blood.

The torso continued to ungainly drag itself along the floor, the voice from the head now screeching and wailing pitifully.

'You're destroying all hope of civilisation, don't you see that? But there's still hope, still a chance; place what remains of me in one of my chambers, pick me up and...'

Mother was tiring, slowing.

Lil stared in wonder at Sis, still a little unsure about what would have to happen next.

*

Outside, streams of children were heading back home.

The few remaining 'servants of the gods' were helping them, recognising now that they had to choice but find a way of working alongside their fellow humans,

The complex was burning, wrecked to a point where it was no longer usable. To a point where it would soon be reclaimed by nature once more.

And the nursery of hybrid children?

Sis assured Lil that she had left it running with what would be the last surges of power, the last reasonings of a dying Mother.

When they were resurrected from their sleep, these children would have to make their own way in the new world that was being created.

A wholly _better_ world, Lil thought with satisfaction as she and Sis walked towards the sea, towards what had once been called Massachusetts Bay.

But why was she still alive to see it all?

When Mother had clicked her fingers to destroy her, had the vibrations she'd set in motion been disturbed by the quaking of the surrounding buildings, itself brought on by Sis's reconnection with her own mother?

Or was it that not even Mother could destroy _all_ human emotion?

Despite all these questions hanging over Lil's survival, there was one that remained more perplexing still.

'Why?' Lil asked.

'Why did I spare you?' Sis said in return, spelling out what Lil still hesitated to ask.

Lil nodded.

'Didn't you believe her?' Lil said. 'Didn't you believe Mother when she said that I contained every terrible human emotion?'

'Of _course_ I believed her,' Sis replied with a playful grin.

She placed an arm around Lil's shoulders, hugged her close, as if they were the very closest of sisters.

'The _Devil_ may be in you, Lil: but so are _all_ the Angels!'

End

If you enjoyed reading this book, you might also enjoy (or you may know someone else who might enjoy) these other books by Jon Jacks.

The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)

The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll's Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666

P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque

Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent

Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak

Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife

Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland

The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas

