And that’s what the vision had been, a horrible thing, a vision of a child, that had died and mummified itself inside her, the great price that she paid for her service to Abraxas and Alastor. She didn’t know how Letho saw it, how he knew it was there, but it did not matter. She herself had known on some level that a child had been there just before her fateful choice; Letho had just confirmed it. She thought of her former self, a stupid young woman in love with a beautiful young man, and how she had given herself to him, and though it wasn’t supposed to happen, she missed a moon’s bleeding or two. And oh, how she had trembled with mingled excitement and terror. And then Alastor had come, and everything had changed.

She hadn’t thought of the child when she had made her choice to serve alongside Mavus and his twin brother Cantus instead of becoming a member of the cattle on which Alastor and his minions had fed. Now she could see it clearly, she had sacrificed the baby that Mavus and she had created, thinking only of herself and how she didn’t want to die as a food source for some other being. She knew what a hideous creature she had become because even in this moment of realization she felt very little, if anything at all. Her insides wanted to ache with longing and regret, and her eyes wanted to shed tears, but they simply would not.

Yes, it was better to die than to live as a decent person trapped in the body of a monster. A monster who, like the father of all monsters who now sat below her, could live forever. She had thought about ending it all before, but when it came down to it, the notion of ending one’s existence in the calm water of oblivion had been too much. She just couldn’t do it.

And then Letho came along. The man who had saved her. She had been ready that day—the day when her sweet one, Mavus, had died for a second and final time. She had chosen life as a cursed Mendraga primarily because he had; he had chosen the path of Alastor’s gift instead of death, and she had followed. So when Jim killed Mavus, she had flown upon him like a raptor composed entirely of hatred and vengeance, and when she had poured out this abject hatred and ended Jim’s existence, there had been nothing left.

Letho had taken her action as a sign of humanity, and had latched on to her because of it. She had been ready for the conflagration, but this strange Eursan had pulled her from it. She couldn’t decide if she loved him or despised him for it. And then there was the other one, the funny one with the smile that melted her, made her feel traces of emotion that she hadn’t savored in a century at least.

Deacon. She saw his face in her mind, heard his voice, and prayed that she had made the right choice.

Such thoughts were dangerous. She saw Abraxas’s consciousness like a great shadow that stalked across the field of his subjects’ minds, discerning their true desires. She hoped that she wasn’t as transparent as those who sometimes came before him to ask for his judgment on their trivial concerns. Even she could see into their minds sometimes, and this brought her great pain from time to time, for sometimes she could see that a citizen’s motives was pure—yet Abraxas still ruled against them. Was it out of some hatred of Eursans? Or was it just a bored mind seeking entertainment?

Alastor appeared out of nowhere, placing a hand on her silken shoulder.

“How are you, my child?” he purred.

Ah, Alastor, the hand of Abraxas. Even under his thick beard and massive mane of obsidian braids, she could see that he had once been a strikingly handsome man, with a noble brow, high cheekbones, and expressive eyes. She placed her hand on his own, trying with every cell of her being not to recoil from his touch. It was not the touch of a father to a child. it was something else; something repulsive. She cleared her mind, fearful that he was rummaging through it.

“Fine, thank you. Much better now that I have eaten,” she said. She looked down at the maiden who lay across a couch nearby, her chest rising and falling slowly in a way that Thresha’s never would again. She had drained the young girl almost completely, but had held back at the last, even though her thirst had driven her mad with desire to drink until the the human was dead. She had consumed many since she had come back into Alastor’s company, for there was no end to the line of those eager to gain favor with the god-king, offering their own sons and daughters like dowries in an unholy union.

“It is a shame that those stinking Eursans treated you so,” Alastor said, stroking her cheek. “Though I still wonder why you didn’t just free yourself from them sooner. Surely even the strongest Tarsi is no match for my little warrior princess.”

Oh how she hated it when Alastor spoke to her as though she were his daughter, or worse, an of object of his desire.

The massive front doors of the palace began to grind open, and one of Abraxas’s servants, a Eursan who had not yet been deemed worthy of receiving the gift, came scampering up the aisle to the daunting stairs that led to his great leader. He kneeled at the bottom of the stairs, his eyes cast down, not daring to look up from the floor.

“Master, Representative Ankor Watt from the Corpus Verum wishes to speak to you,” the servant said.

“Oh, this will be entertaining. It’s always a pleasure to hear from the sleepers,” Alastor remarked, laughing coldly as they both watched from the balcony.

“Very well, please show her in,” Abraxas said. The servant bowed even lower, then shot up into a standing position and ran toward the front entrance.

A few moments later, seven of the labor sector workers, known colloquially as hammerheads, trudged through the doorway. One stood out front, perhaps their representative, while behind him the remaining six struggled forward in two lines of three men each, carrying a massive platform, a relic of pre-exodus Eursan technology. Thresha marveled at their broad shoulders, easily as far across as two normal men standing shoulder to shoulder, and the flatness of their brows, which seemed to hang over their eyes like shutters. How could they see under such pronounced brows?

These beings were not normal—or so she had gleaned from the minds of her masters. They had been created using special genetic protocols to harden them against the changing climate and enhance their physique while at the same time dimming their minds. They were bred as a servant class, meant to maintain the machines that kept the Corpus Verum and their many associates alive and well while they slept in their computerized sarcophagi. And no one had rioted, it seemed, at this massive breach in ethics. Everyone had been too busy securing their ticket to ride a Fulcrum station to care about the caste system the Corpus Verum was setting up.

The hammerheads lumbered to a stop, and Thresha could see the sweat glistening on their bristly arms. She found herself wondering what they might taste like. How quickly she had lapsed back into old behaviors since returning to Alastor and Abraxas! During her time with Letho she had truly felt that she had rekindled a bit of her former self, an optimistic and kind woman who had a taste for good food and nineteenth-century Arandos paintings. How much of her former self remained dormant inside, and how much had been ruined by Alastor and his gifts?

The sound of the hammerheads dropping their platform to the floor clanged around in the vaulted ceilings of Abraxas’s hall. The hammerheads groaned, rubbing their boulder-like biceps. They seemed to pay Abraxas no mind, and Thresha wondered if they could even perceive the nature of his status. Perhaps, like cattle, they knew only the feedbag and the whip.

But the the hammerhead who had been in front of the procession seemed different. Thresha could see that he wasn’t quite as short and anvil-shaped as his cohorts, nor were his features quite as simian as theirs. His movement had some grace to it, and the effect was quite jarring, like seeing a quadrupedal animal walking on two feet. He turned and bowed to Abraxas while his brethren snorted and flatulated behind him. The dichotomy between the low-behaving hammerheads and this bright one was fascinating to Thresha, and she watched his every move with great care. Who was this man? That is, if he could even be called a “man,” considering his genetic pedigree.