Hallowed sectors were left to rot, wither, fumble and ferment, stumbling ferocities and calamitous caprice unfolded into reckless abandon, into potent lyrics and undying valor, hollowed remnants of hell come to greet the divine, chiseling away at paragon pedestals. Revolving fixations, transfixing and spellbinding, pervaded through nature’s divine covenant, plucked rose harmonies from the flood of her vocals and damned the relentless chords of her reaching rapture. From Tangere’s escape, heeding her demand, fleeing, dashing, ensnaring warnings and coasting into silver abyss, Nao ignoring them altogether, searing and scorching, Imogen pierced but still fighting amongst the zealous tirades, embellishing power through smoke, fire and infernal gallantry, to her wayward song as it sought to abolish abominations through the animal, carnivore coil. There was nearly no time for regrets, for laments to polish ambitious dirges, to puncture the rhapsody of her singsong deliverance, to wonder if the burning machinations of Imogen’s unrelenting might scalded a hole in Kahlua’s heart, to see if Lena’s would be buried under its rubble too, to wonder if the world would shift and finally swallow them whole in its overwhelming, all-consuming nightmare. She only felt her kitsune’s fury, a vixen’s tumultuous wrath varnishing her veins, and the pull, the weight, the tangle of her power ripple through the surface of her pelt, glowing, luminescent, consuming the intertwining coat of ash, soot and decay through the Glazier’s screams, through the horror, the terror, the tyranny of the strange fates they faced. It wrapped the world, the clinging antipathy, the rasping, gasping, grueling, searing blades of acrimony into warm divisions of thread and strands, weaved a brilliant bough across the rapier tongue of Kahlua’s pincers, fought along the walls of its burdensome nettles and pried away the nefarious decadence, left dreams reeling and peeling. Only when she’d finished the brief, unwavering spell, and the smoke cleared, could her clear, composed eyes obtain the pictures they’d chased.

What had the glass-molder faced in the grasp of malice and menace? What anguish had she faced, what heartbreak had she rendered, what chasms had she brooded and bade until everything unholy had made her come undone? What choked the spirit, the effusion, the essence of all her kindness, all her benedictions, into unyielding strife, into suffocating maelstroms? How could the songbird retrieve all the goodness, all the moralities, all the tenderness and generosity from the tangled, knotted barbs of stoked, instigated menace? She shook, she shuddered, she quaked, a leaf on the wind, chased away by the rendered monstrosities of another being trapped in her frame, and the sienna belle reached forward, extended her cranium to wrap around the painted femme’s nape, offer protection, refuge, a haven across her broad shoulders, a petaled Elysium. Another reverie crooned from the decibels of her lips, soft and sweet, mellifluous and fluid, hoping to chase away the sins, the scars, the singed flesh and the portals of madness sunk back into its well. Through the beats of rhapsody, she sang away travesty, she brandished her unseen sword into the sinew of the nefarious, lacquered and stitched seams of glory back into their glossy surface. As Imogen tended to her own wounds, licking and plucking away at the thorns she’d gained from courageous acts, Lena composed dreams and sonnets, breathing assuaging hymns over the beat of Kahlua’s frantic, frenetic frame. “You are forgiven. All will be well again.” Meticulous threads of sanguine whispers, gallant and wise, extensions of sage selflessness, a harmonic veil slinking and sliding across sinned apertures, kept phantoms and wraiths at bay for another day. “It wasn’t you.” Across the plain, she raised her gaze to the worried Nao, a child born from poison and strength, diligence and survival, winking to assure her of no further threats. A monster had been consumed, devoured, its armor spurned away from the beloved creature it’d possessed, and they needed to do the same for so many more.