The Holy City of Elpeck was a hollow sepulcher, and its dead were in its walls. A sporey haze hung in the night, pumped out from the sporestacks dreaming among the ruined spires. Streets once covered with bodies like mounds of needles among pines were now the avenues of &alon's spreading, brutalist jungle. Some of the corpses had joined her invasive, strangler-fig architecture, climbing up the buildings they'd once lived and known. Others had fused into many-limbed monstrosities and taken their leave, lumbering out of mass graves and into the hills or the Bay. The silent titans were one of the few sources of movement left below the war beyond the smoldering skyline. Karl could easily list the others: tendril dogs galloping through the streets, leaping off broken cars; the flames dancing in the dusty ruins and their shadows; the swaying groans of wyrms turned to trees, and his own, fleeting, glimpses of other golden-eyes roving through the desolation. A handful of the golden-eyed wyrms were up in the sky, combating the few remaining flower-ships, but most were low to the ground, sifting through the rubble of what they'd lost.

Occasionally, a skirmish would roar down and through a street, wyrms and silver strangers wrestling mid-air, clawing as they chased, and any golden-eyes on the ground nearby fled like scavengers before the sound and the light, darting to the refuge of skyscrapers' skeletons.

Karl hadn't been the only one of the hospital wyrms to try to talk with these other survivors, but these wyrms weren't interested in talking. They just wanted to hide and be left alone.

"Get away!" one said. "You'll remind &alon we're here!"

They were terrified, doubly so, when they saw Dr. Rathpalla leading Karl's group.

Songs of warning echoed through the destruction, bouncing off the broken windows.

"It's not safe."

"There's nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide."

Their whispers rustled through the night like autumn leaves.

Karl's nerves were at war with themselves. There was no way on this or any other world that he could have let Dr. Rathpalla fly off toward the city center without following after him. Karl was terribly worried about him, and if something happened…

I want to be there…

He didn't want Dr. Rathpalla to die alone.

At the same time, the feeling of dread in Karl's chest crept up a little higher with every city block the group flew past.

"I'm scared," a wyrm whispered, from somewhere out of sight.

A song bounced around in mad absurdity. "She'll take us away! She'll take us away!"

Karl couldn't tell if the wyrm was trumpeting in ecstasy or terror.

No: it was both.

He had to fight the urge to turn tail and fly away as fast as he could. He fought it by thinking of Nurse Costran and Dr. Marteneiss and Mrs. Elbock and everyone else who was refusing to give up, even in the face of despair.

"I'm with you, Karl," Geoffrey said, speaking into Karl's mane. The spirit glanced back at Bever and Jonan. "We're all with you."

Karl just prayed that would be enough.

Yuth swam ahead, rising up and then sweeping back down to come up beside Dr. Rathpalla "Ibrahim," she pled, "please, talk to me! Where are you going?"

The psychiatrist shook his head, sending a ripple down his mane. "I don't know. I don't know."

He froze for a moment, curling like a question mark. He glanced back at the rest of the group. "I'm scared…" he muttered, and then he turned around and shot forward, even quicker than before.

Mrs. Elbock tapped a claw tip on Karl's flank. "Come on."

Karl nodded and picked up speed.

"Do you think Kurt will convince the others to come help?" Jonan asked.

As the group had departed from Elpeck Polytechnic, Kurt had volunteered to fly off and tell the rest of the wyrms what had happened.

Karl would have shrugged, but he didn't know if his body could do that. He didn't have much in the way of shoulders anymore. "I hope so," he said. "I'm just worried they won't be able to find us."

"They'll have no trouble finding us," Geoffrey said. The Count of Seasweep braced himself against Karl's neck as he looked up at the last strains of sunset dying at the horizon. "The Silver Strangers are keeping their distance from the city."

"I would, too, after all the shit that happened," Jonan quipped.

"No," Geoffrey said, "I meant… as long as the Strangers stay away, it should be safe for the others to traverse the city."

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"But they don't know where we're going," Jonan replied, nervously. "Hell, I don't even know where we're going!"

Below the broad street opened onto a grand space.

"I think I do…" Dr. Nowston said.

Though Karl had never been, himself, he had more than enough spirits within him to know that the group had just entered Elpeck's Civic Center. Their knowledge filled his mind, teaching him the names of places he'd never known.

Cascaton Park.

The Melted Palace.

The Imperial Palace.

The Promenade.

Even in Karl's own time, the city's sacred core had been famous all the world over. It was no surprise its fame had only grown since then.

"Fucking hell…" Jonan muttered. "What happened here?"

The heart of the city was a meadow of scattered wyrm-trees growing from the wreckage sprawled out within the confines of the brunt and burning buildings surrounding the place like walls.

The devastation even rose into the sky.

One of the larger wyrm trees had roots like stilts, projecting downward from the long, horizontal trunk up past the rooftops. From a distance, many of the wyrm trees looked like candle wax drippings, though if Karl looked closely, he could see rivulets of dark fluid slowly trickling down their scaly bark.

Just like Larry Luxenderf and, now, Dr. Rathpalla, too.

The Melted Palace still dominated the Civic Center, even with its roof and upper floors caved in, though the gigantic wyrm tree growing directly in front of the great Lassedile cathedral obscured much of the damage behind its many branches and the wyrmheads moaning wordlessly at their tips.

Dr. Nowston glanced at it briefly, but then shuddered and turned away. "That big tree used to be Lassedite Verune, you know."

"The time-traveler?" Jonan asked.

Dr. Nowston nodded. "The one and only."

As Karl stared at the monstrous thing, he noticed that it, too, was dripping. Inky droplets gathered on the undersides of its branches, and fell from there, collecting in a broad pool on the basilica's pavement. Small, multicolored fires broke out on the fluid's surface, flickering, and then fading.

Just looking at them made Karl shudder.

"What are you feeling now, Dr. Rathpalla?" Mrs. Elbock asked.

The psychiatrist could barely keep himself still. He sat on the ground, constantly turning and looking around, spastically surveying the surroundings while murmuring soft, incoherent wyrmsong.

"Not here," he said. "But near. Not here, but near."

Hovering off the pavement, Dr. Rathpalla glided down the street, keeping low to the ground as he moved away from the Melted Palace.

Karl immediately followed him, chasing after Dr. Rathpalla quickly enough that he saw the wyrm turn down one of the main boulevard's branches right before letting out a soul-curdling scream that made the rest of the group swim after Ibrahim like flies to honey.

"It's here!" Dr. Rathpalla screamed. "It's here!"

Karl slithered down the street.

"The Imperial Palace?" Dr. Marteneiss asked. She had appeared in the middle of the road, not far from Dr. Rathpalla.

"Yes, yes!" The psychiatrist shook his head up and down with manic intensity.

Yuth snorted out spores. "Yes yes what? Damn it, Ibrahim!"

Dr. Rathpalla bent over and started to shake and scream, weeping without human tears, squeezing out spurts of spores.

Everyone wanted to go comfort him, but was afraid he might attack them if they tried. But after several minutes, Dr. Rathpalla gasped, snorting out a great burst of spores.

His composure immediately returned to normal. He sat up in a single coil and started rubbing his claws along his forearms.

"Dr. Rathpalla," Karl asked, "are you alright?"

But Ibrahim shook his head. "I wish I was." He looked up at the Imperial Palace. "Larry had attacks just like these. They grew more and more intense, right up until the end when he…" but Ibrahim couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence.

Jonan dismounted from Karl's back. "Attack? You mean it comes and goes?"

Dr. Rathpalla nodded again. "Yes. I…" He stared at his hands. "I don't know how much longer I have before I pass the point of no return."

Meanwhile, Dr. Marteneiss had stepped closer to the Palace, which she was staring at in confusion and disbelief.

"What's wrong, Dr. Marteneiss?" Yuth asked.

Heggy turned around. "I distinctly remember seein' this place's roof collapse durin' the fight with the Lassedite, right before I died."

Jonan shook his head in confusion. "What?"

Dr. Nowston made a low, fearful tone. "No… she's right. I remember. I saw it too."

"But the roof isn't damaged," Karl said.

Or, if it was, it wasn't any kind of damage he recognized. But then he gasped and slunk back.

"What?" Dr. Rathpalla asked. "What is it?"

Karl pointed at the Imperial Palace. "Use your third eyes!"

The others did, and—except for Dr. Nowston—they were just as startled as he had been.

Even with his third eyes open, Karl often kept their special wyrmsight inactive, because of how distracting it was with all the energies flying through the air in the thick of battle.

But here…?

Karl saw the threads of the wyrms' flight magic wrapped around their bodies. It was easier to conjure the power and leave it in place, like a candle, to be lit up and activated when needed instead of having to rebuild it every time they wanted to fly. In the Imperial Palace's shadow, those same threads were being peeled away and sucked into the building.

Something was drawing them in.

Dr. Rathpalla slithered up to the entrance, but then stopped and turned around to face the rest of the group. "Everyone…" He closed his eyes. "If you don't mind, I'd like to spend what time I have left trying to understand what's happening to me."

"What do you mean?" Dr. Nowston asked.

"There's something here. I don't know where, exactly, nor what it even is, but it's here, and it's important."

"Important how?" Jonan asked.

Ibrahim's head hung slack. "I wish I knew. I don't know if this will make a difference or not, but," he clenched his claws, "I refuse to let this thing kill me without at least some explanation of what it is and what it does. I'm going inside, no matter what. I don't expect any of you to come along, it's probably going to be—"

"—Of course we're coming with you, you damn doodler," Yuth said. She looked at everyone else. "Anyone opposed?"

No one said or did anything, not even Dr. Derric.

That took Dr. Rathpalla aback. "You guys…"

"We've been in this together from the beginning," Dr. Nowston said. "We might not have all started at the same time, or in quite the same way, but what fucking difference does that make in the grand scheme of things?" He nodded, and then turned his snout to the Palace. "This threat affects all of us. Anything we can do to better prepare ourselves is worth doing."

Dr. Marteneiss crossed her arms. "Then what are we waiting for? Let's get this disaster over with."

And she smiled.

Then wyrmsong rang out from the distance. Mrs. Elbock raised her head to look.

"It looks like Mr. Clawless has brought reinforcements."

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