Hadras motioned around him. “Isn’t it obvious? My brothers and I fortified the temple’s magic as best as we could. We added new protection seals, and we carved a thousand charms into the columns and the walls to keep the poison from spreading… because that’s what the World Crusher’s rage feels like. Poison. It burns through your brain, it makes you vicious and always angry. It eats away at your soul until there is nothing left.” In that sense, this situation differed from my own. My suffering had manifested through the Black Fever, mimicking physical disease and making people sick. What they were describing was something much deeper. “Our measures didn’t help much.”
“You feel her, don’t you?” Eneas asked, watching me with renewed interest. I nodded once. “For what it’s worth, we do apologize. We failed to contain it. The poison spread, and it corrupted the people. They fought over everything and nothing. They killed one another in the streets. They started wars. They obliterated their own civilization. The last people standing after the Doom of Biriane, as we called it, took up knives and went for each other’s throats. It didn’t stop with the people, either. It did the same to the animals. Every insect, every beast from the woods, every bird—they tore through their own. Pecked out eyes and hearts. Killed relentlessly until nothing was left. Until Biriane became this…”
“And then the trees started to die,” Malin said. “The grass. The flowers. Life itself succumbed to the World Crusher’s rage, forcing the first Reaper to live up to her name, I suppose. This is all that remains. What you see before you. Stone and dirt and dust.”
“Plus, a pretty sunset,” Filicore chuckled bitterly.
The more I listened, the angrier I felt. How could Death have let this happen? “Where was Death in all of this?” I asked, a fire burning in my chest.
“Oh, she tried to do something, too. After the Biriane people were gone, she came down here. We showed her everything we’d done, and she laid charms of her own. Powerful stuff based on words and sub-words that we didn’t even know,” Eneas said. “None of it worked. You see, you may be powerful, Unending, but the World Crusher is more so. In terms of strength, she’s closer to Death’s level than you will ever be.”
Tristan sighed deeply. “Death could never bring herself to destroy her own creation. Not until the Spirit Bender, at least.”
“Technically speaking, the World Crusher cannot be destroyed,” Eneas replied.
“What do you mean? Anything that Death makes can be destroyed,” I said, alarm bells ringing in my head. The implication of his statement terrified me. At least the Spirit Bender could be tossed into the nothingness. Any of my siblings could suffer the same fate, effortlessly, at the hands of Death. And yet the World Crusher was somehow exempt?
“Not the World Crusher,” Eneas declared. “I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but Death was convinced that her first could not be sent into the nothingness because there’s too much of Death herself inside this Reaper. Something about rapport of power and concentration of death—literal death. Point is, she couldn’t destroy the World Crusher.”
Tristan touched my arm gently. “We have to remember that Death was… young, so to speak. Just like she was when she made you.”
“Worse, actually,” I replied. “Worse, if she didn’t even consider making her creation vulnerable in some way.”
“And so, here we are, the suckers of the universe,” Fileas said with a shrug. “Death forbade us to leave, saying we’d simply have to keep renewing the charms and the spells indefinitely. We had already succumbed to the rage, anyway. We were Ghoul Reapers by the time she got here, and our condition is irreversible, it seems, because our souls perished in the process.”
“Much like other ghouls,” I murmured.
“Not really. We never ate a soul. World destroyed ours. This is us, ages later… empty, black-eyed, and miserable.” Eneas came closer.
“What do you feed on, then? If you’re part-ghoul, for lack of a better term?” I asked. His proximity made me tense from head to toe. Unwillingly, he’d become a vehicle for the World Crusher’s rage. The poison didn’t just ooze from inside the temple. It had found a beacon in the Ghoul Reapers, whose physical forms amplified its effect.
“On our own rage. On the distant dream of freedom,” he replied. “We don’t need food. Technically speaking, we’re still Reapers, so we don’t need to feed. Our souls just died, so the ghoulish degradation is in a limbo. I assume we’ll become beasts if we eat souls, but we’ve never felt the urge. Of course, by the time World killed us on the inside, the people of Biriane had already been destroyed and were long gone. But I look at you now and I look at your husband, too, and… well, let’s just say I don’t feel peckish. Consider us an anomaly.” The closer he got, the worse I felt. It forced me to take a step back and apologize. “Forgive me, Eneas. It’s too much, even for me.”
“Imagine what it’s like for us!” he hissed, slipping into a sort of fury.
Tristan reached out to me telepathically. Be careful with them. They’re twitchy and volatile, likely a side effect of the World Crusher’s rage. They might seem okay now, but there are micro-expressions I keep seeing, faint signals of alarm. They’re not stable.
I gave my husband a faint nod, then smiled at Eneas. “How can we help?”
“Start by telling us why you’re here,” he replied.
“I wanted to know if it was true, what Anunit told me. How were your conversations with her?” I asked. “She didn’t tell us much.”
Hadras grinned coldly. “We beat the living daylights out of Anunit and sent her away with a promise to do worse if she ever came back. I don’t sense her now, so I assume you two came here alone.”
“We did,” I replied. “Please, allow me to apologize on behalf
