What else have I to do with life?
I reach into the light, reach for the angel wings. The burn starts up my arms immediately, surging through skin and nerve, muscle and metal. My spiders are on it, busily repairing the damage.
I grasp the wings. They feel—indescribable. Like solid light, heavy and light, substantial and immaterial at the same time. This close to their radiance, I can make out no detail. My fingers numb as I grasp them, sling them over my shoulders.
They come alive, then, grasping my chest, creeping over my back, melding with me.
Intense heat blooms through my muscles. Tendrils of the wings—of angel craft—root into me. They wind through my body, and everywhere they touch, they bring a purity so sharp it hurts.
I shudder.
I can bear it. With my spiders repairing and strengthening my body, I have enough time.
And then angel craft reaches my brain, and all of a sudden, everything changes.
This is beyond my transformation. My senses and my faculties expand in one breath-taking instant. I have no words for what I can now sense, no way to understand all that I now know.
A thought, a mere mental twitch, and the wings spread out behind and to either side of me with a swish.
Power runs into me like a current, radiates from my body.
Angel craft slides down my arms. It covers my left hand up to the tips of my fingers. My right resists—or else the angel craft will not force the issue with a hand made of metal.
I stretch my left arm, up to the ceiling, fingers stiff. Another thought, and there’s a hole in the ceiling, straight through layers of mud and stone and sand. A whole cylinder of material has vanished.
Harsh daylight shines down on me.
I bend my knees, flex my muscles, and leap.
The angel wings catch me, carry me, riding straight up on a wave of power that’s both a rush and a burn. Together, we fly into the molten sky.
The closer we get to the salt, the night walkers and I, the more it feels like we’re pushing against a gale. Rock crumbles away from our feet, the sky is obscured with weird lights, and I can no longer trust my sense of direction or time. The Painted Mountains dance, bands of color twisting around each other. Ghostly figures act out fixed tableaus—one man killing another, a mother scooping up her child—and I can no longer tell if what I’m seeing is the past, present, or the future.
Even worse is the nothingness gouged into the landscape. Pits of no light, no air, no strings.
Just emptiness.
Off to one side, a night walker staggers straight into one of these hollows, collapses into a pile of sand and a scatter of bleached white bone.
All around me, other night walkers follow suit.
They’re sacrificing their bodies to halt the wrongness, replacing the desert with themselves.
I press on. My new sleek body grows battered and pitted. The shine is gone. Previously well-oiled joints squeak and shrill, small parts break and fall off.
No matter. I’m at the top of the hills now.
I look down at the salt fields, and flinch.
The demon’s straining out of the salt, its back long, skinny, and ridged. The fingers of one hand are clenched in the ground. It lifts its skull-like head as I approach. Ghastly green fires burn in the sockets. Its mouth is a rictus of hate and pain and rage.
It’s a dying creature, entombed in salt for so many centuries. It will not survive long, but it’ll take as much of the world down with it as it can.
This I cannot allow.
I will not let all the sacrifices of the eilendi, of my mentor, of Kato, be in vain.
Curtains of sickly light flicker between me and the salt demon. I flex the knees of the golem body, sink into the sand.
Then I run.
Lines of light rip through my body, cris-crossing it with dents and scratches. One arm disappears in a boil of light, the fingers of one hand are chopped clean off.
Still I run.
I lose a foot and my gait is a fast shuffle, one leg dragging behind the other.
I push on.
I’m almost there. I—just—have to get—close—enough.
And as the golem crumbles—finally—into a pile of metal flakes, I gather myself into one tight ball of energy and make the leap.
Right into the salt demon.
I see her jump.
It’s a swift, subtle movement, a faint shimmer in the air, unnoticeable to human senses.
But I’m enhanced. I pick up that shift of particles, and my brain recognizes it immediately.
It’s Flutter, and she’s inside the salt demon.
Don’t be an idiot! I shout the words inside my own head, hearing them echo in my skull. I have barely any power to spare for even that thought; all my being is wrapped in trying to maintain some form of control over the angel wings.
They burn bright around me, a radiant shell. Inside it, though, I’m already worn and exhausted.
Such things were never meant to be worn by humans.
I only need hold on for a little while.
Already the wrongness is flowing away from me. The angel wings burn it away, searing the bleeding wounds of the world.
I snap them back and dive, turning my body into a spear of light. I punch the salt demon with my angel craft-covered left hand, follow it up with a series of kicks, wheeling and whirling around its head like some kind of gnat.
The creature bellows, a deep sound too low for human ears, that thrums in my bones. It’s dying, angel craft scoring its bones, Flutter shredding it from within, but not fast enough.
Not fast enough for me.
Angel craft burrows into my body, grips me tight, burns me alive. I could kill the thing—but what about Flutter?
Then I see her. In the
