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Fenrir didn’t know what a Myrkur on the brink of death looked like, but he imagined it was something like this.

“Six degrees to the south,” she murmured when the hazy blue-gray glow of the Deadlands’ sun seemed at its zenith. Fenrir signaled to the two other vehicles to adjust their direction towards a place on the horizon that arced and dipped sharper than the rest.

He saw it then: the shiver of a mountain to the south, shadows reshaping in the peripheral of his vision.

“Daedra, at our three-o’clock,” he breathed, “what is that?”

She twisted in her seat and gasped.

“By the cold flame,” she whispered, “the Prometheus.”

It rose from the ground like some great tower assembling in real time. A hulking skyscraper of a thing, dust churned below it, rolling across the shale to swallow their path in a choking fog while the whole world trembled before its first gargantuan step.

Then another. And another. Until it was running straight for them.

“Ama,” Daedra breathed, in awe. In fear.

But Fenrir couldn’t look anywhere but directly ahead, because there on the horizon, emerging from the dust cloud like a mirage, was Sanctuary.

Fenrir depressed the pedal to the floor and the vehicle lurched into a sprint. And despite the shadow that fell over them, despite the roar that tore open his head and the fling of rocks and dust that followed in its wake, despite the ground trembling beneath their tires as the distance between them and the Prometheus closed in too-fast pinch, Fenrir smiled.

Because they’d made it.

He’d made it.

I’m almost there, Fifi, just hang on.

Chapter XLII

Death Knell

He was dreaming again, of that much he was sure.

Hell sprawled around him, the grove of trees long lost, a smoking battleground taking its place, empty of soldiers except for the bodies that littered the ground. He couldn’t see their faces. Whatever magic brought him here was tenuous, filling in their details with the smear of diluted paint. He did try to identify them. It felt like the right thing to do when surrounded by so much death. But each time he looked, his chest ached like it had that first time, a throbbing pulse that tugged at the core of him, like standing at the edge of a great sadness he’d never escape.

How dare you ever try.

Shale crunched beneath his boots while glimmering dust motes clung to his robes, swirling around him, drifting towards a point on the horizon he could barely see. He walked amongst the bodies, decay heavy on his tongue, through smoke that curled up from still smoldering ruins, towards a shimmering mirage that coalesced from the twilight like a great shadowy spear.

All too late, he recognized it.

A spire, like the ones that guarded Sanctuary, but broken halfway down the center, its needly point laid out across the shale to point towards something he never thought he’d see in Hell, let alone ever again.

Silhouetted against a torn-open horizon, golden light bleeding from a wound that split the sky with fire, hooded eyes alight with a violet glow rather than Rim-pale ice was—

“Fenrir?” Orpheus whispered, voice swept away by a banshee wind.

Wake up.

He gasped, shaking. “What—”

A hand landed on his shoulder, squeezing tight. “It’s time, mage. Wake up.”

Orpheus struggled from the dredges of the dream, that awful taste of death chasing him here, thick on his tongue, so real and so tangible that he didn’t immediately parse the figure crouched over him. He blinked up at a deeply cowled hood as familiar as it was impossible, because Orpheus had killed the hermits and there was no way they were here—

No, not a hermit—a priest. An Architect.

“No,” he moaned, smacking the hand away and scrambling backwards, only to encounter a body of pain. Orpheus hissed and curled into a tighter ball. “Don’t touch me!”