"You lack something, and not just legs. You are an ideal creature, born of pure thought. Of course you could not battle one such as Phage, who is all flesh and flesh eating. You need a baser self, a bestial self. Here are legs for you, and a savage heart. You need them both." He drew a deep breath. "I offer them to you. Will you take them?"

Akroma rose to her hands, wings folded behind her. She crawled toward the jaguar, dragging her own severed parts behind. Reaching the beast, she set her elbows on the ground and peered at the creature. Into its backward-slanting ear, she whispered, "Forgive me."

The merciful words faded before merciless fingers. They stabbed through the creature's beautiful pelt, eight knives slicing deep. Muscles severed, and tendons snapped. White hands turned red. The creature tried to cry, but those nails sliced its larynx on their way to its spine. Her nails found a disk within and jabbed, severing the all-powerful cord. Fingertips met.

Again, the angel was weeping. Beneath her, the creature had gone limp, its life pouring across the white stone balcony.

"Off," Ixidor said quietly. "Entirely off."

Akroma twisted her hands. The head and neck of the great cat came free. She laid it reverently aside and sank down upon the red pool. "What now? How will you join us?"

Ixidor did not answer. He reached his hand down, dipping fingertips in the red. Drops jiggled as he walked away. "Creation is messy. It is painful and maddening."

He approached a wall of white stone and stood staring at it. Suddenly, he understood the old demon Yawgmoth. Whether or not he was evil to start with, the pain and madness of creation-the limitless power and limitless responsibility-had made him evil.

Idly, Ixidor lifted a finger and dragged a vertical smudge down the wall. "These things are inevitable. Every creature cries out to be saved, but who can save a creator?" He broadened the base of the line and sketched one feline leg, and another. Smearing his thumb sideways, he formed a powerful body, ending in a tail and hind legs. "Even love cannot save a creator." Two canted lines to either side made for wings, and individual drips of blood traced out the plumes-coverts, primaries, and secondaries.

Ixidor stepped back, squinting at the image before him. He raised his hand and watched the blood trace out his fingerprints and soak into his nail beds. He rubbed the red stuff across his thumb. "The more powerful the creator, the more certainly he will be trapped inside a world of his own devising."

Stepping forward, Ixidor pressed his thumb against the stone, creating a blob that would be the angel's head. It was the right size and shape, yes, but he could never capture the face of Nivea. "To create is perilous. In the end, it will kill the creator." He leaned forward to the wall and pressed his lips to the bloody head of the angel. Closing his eyes, he drew the image into himself and projected it outward onto reality.

She was there. He sensed it in his missing arm-health, strength, wholeness. He had completed her.

"Master," Akroma said behind him. "You have done it. I am once again your Protector."

Ixidor leaned against the wall, panting. He was kitten weak. He couldn't hold himself up but slid down the cold stone. His lips and face smeared the image he had drawn. It didn't matter. It had transcended its materials and taken on a life of its own. As Ixidor slumped, he turned slowly around and sat in a disheveled heap.

Before him hovered a vision-his vision made real. No scars remained on Akroma's body. She was stronger, smoother, more powerful than before. Her lower torso fused with the body of a great cat-four massive legs, a flashing tail, and wide wings. The plumes reached twice their previous span and jutted from the shoulders of the cat. In one strong arm, she bore a staff like a jagged lightning bolt, energy made solid.

Ixidor glimpsed these transformations only briefly. His eyes were drawn away instead to the angel's glorious face-the face of Nivea.

No, she was Nivea no longer. Surrounded in a mantle of flesh-part mane and part halo-Akroma's visage was more beautiful than Ixidor could have imagined. She had transcended his memories of Nivea, as every lost love grows greater in time. Her glory was almost unbearable, and the look of sadness in her eyes nearly slew him.

"What is it?" she asked, magnificent before her disheveled creator.

He could only shake his head. "You have eclipsed her. Now, as long as you live, I can never see her again."

Ixidor waited until midnight. The Protector slept, and darkness ruled every comer of paradise. He needed darkness and solitude for what he was about to do.

Phage and Kamahl were on their way. They were bringing a conglomerate army bent on slaying the Protector. Once she was gone, they would ravage his creation and kill him as well.

In solemn silence, Ixidor stepped from the white-marble pier onto the dark barge. It lay low in inky waters. Like avatars of night, the unmen followed. They spread in a circle around him and stood, nervous sentinels. Stars sent streaks of white across the black face of the deep. The barge man's pole stirred those lines, like a stick gathering cobwebs, and the barge shoved out over the blackness.

Ixidor needed other protectors and defenders-armies of them. He needed as many as the stars in the sky.

While the craft glided before rhythmic strokes of the pole, Ixidor watched those stars. Brightly they beamed, gregarious. Even here in the midst of his creation, those patient eyes followed him-soothing, healing, sending news from distant worlds. The stars were Ixidor's peers. He could not change them, but he could fashion something beautiful from their light.

He would make disciples from their reflections.

Stepping to the edge of the barge, Ixidor knelt and peered down at the crazings of light. It was primordial energy, ready to be shaped. But how? What medium could he use to craft beams of light? He had not brought canvas or paint, clay or wood. He trailed his hand in the water, shaping the light into whorls and eddies, but the barge itself was more powerful, sending waves before and behind.

Ixidor scooped up a handful of water, the stars momentarily trapped within. Before he could transform them, they dribbled away between his fingers.

The thrust of the pole made an insistent rhythm. It entered Ixidor's knees and dragged at his whole body. It shaped the water too.

What were waves but sound? If he could shape sound, he could shape waves and the lights that lay upon them.

Ixidor lay prostrate, his hand spread across the planks. He hummed in time to the pole man. Music would be his medium. He wanted to make disciples of these points of light, so he sang a song of discipleship.

Come with me, my children.

Ride within my eyes, upon my brow.

Learn what I have known, and then

I'll learn all that you know.

Heal the heart that's broken.

Salve the flesh that dies, that's fainting now.

Drink the cup I drink, my children.

Together we will grow.

He rose and stood, chanting all the while. His voice droned, regularizing the waves. The peaks rose into a matrix of mounds; the valleys sank into cup-shapes among them. Starlight gathered on each prominence. Ixidor needed only to bring them to final focus. Stomping his foot in time with the pole strokes, he sang the final stanza.

Come with me, my children.

Come to life, my thought, my heart's desire.

Light eternal, sweet companion,

I'll be your living pyre.

With the final note, the waves around the barge achieved perfect form. Hundreds of points of light coalesced. They rose from the water. No longer were they simply reflections, but living radiance. Like will-o'-the-wisps, the newborn creatures whirled up into the air. Sparking blue-white, they curled in a scintillating cloud of orbs and orbited their creator. The sky danced with a choir of creatures-changeable stars beneath changeless ones.