It was disappointing, certainly, though not in any way unexpected.
The broodmother had served its purpose well enough, anchoring her influence into this stubborn, vibrant world and providing a steady stream of raw material with which to experiment, but she had never been foolish enough to believe it would endure forever. The accursed hero had always been relentless, always intent on carving her way through every obstacle placed before her, and even now the Witch could feel the tremor of holy force reverberating through the threads of corruption that bound her creations together. The broodmother was doomed; of that there was little doubt. Its destruction was no longer a matter of if, but when. Still, doom did not equate to failure.
The god-corpse’s influence, that exquisite and festering gift she had claimed for herself, had already seeped deep into the soil and marrow of this place. It clung to the roots of trees and pooled in the hollows beneath the earth, and it whispered softly through the veins of every creature reshaped in her image. Even if the broodmother were reduced to sanctified ash, the taint would remain, subtle and insidious, ready to be cultivated anew. She had always understood that true conquest was not about a single fortress or a single monstrosity, but about saturation, about embedding oneself so thoroughly that removal became all but impossible.
It had been close, admittedly. The hero’s arrival had come sooner than anticipated, and the speed at which she cut through the lesser spawn was irritating in its efficiency. There was something deeply tiresome about righteousness when it was backed by competence. But the Witch was nothing if not adaptable. She could withdraw without shame, slipping deeper into the folds of this world where even divine senses struggled to pierce. The forests here were vast, the mountains rugged, and beyond them stretched cities teeming with unaware and, in many cases, quite fortunate victims.
Yes, fortunate.
She found the term amusing, because what greater fortune could there be than to be chosen as the foundation of something new and beautiful? This world was so brimming with life, so recklessly abundant in flesh and bone, that it almost felt wasteful not to reshape it. Perhaps she would travel for a time, wander these lands beneath borrowed skies, and acquaint herself with the customs and architecture of this curious planet. There was no reason her work could not be accompanied by leisure. She could abduct a handful of suitable subjects here and there, observe how their physiology reacted to her touch, and refine her methods while enjoying the scenery.
Of course, before any of that, she would need to rebirth herself properly.
Inhabiting a corpse, even one sustained by divine rot and willpower alone, was an experience that had long since lost any novelty. The stiffness of dead flesh, the faint, ever-present awareness of decay pressing in at the edges of sensation, it was all profoundly inconvenient. A new body, crafted with intention and care, would be far more pleasant. She had learned enough from this world already to attempt something… innovative.
Oh, she had time. Time to rebuild, time to experiment, time to turn setback into opportunity as she had done so many times before. The hero might claim victory over the broodmother and believe she had stemmed the tide, but that would only be because she could not see the broader design unfolding just beyond her reach.
And besides, the broodmother held a delightful little surprise nestled deep within its grotesque frame, something seeded carefully in anticipation of this very outcome. When the holy spear finally struck true and the monster collapsed in ruin, the accursed hero would discover that triumph did not come without consequence.
The Witch smiled faintly to herself, already retreating into the darker currents of her influence, content in the knowledge that even defeat could be shaped into something entertaining.
Easy. Or at least, it should not have been easy.
That was the thought that lingered in Farah’s mind as she stood within the innermost chamber of the ruined castle, staring at the trembling oval of light suspended in the air before her. For months she had expected failure. For years, even. She had prepared herself for miscalculations, for catastrophic backlashes of power, for the sort of divine resistance that would shatter stone and bone alike. She had braced herself for struggle.
Instead, the ritual had answered her almost eagerly to the point that it unnerved her.
The chamber itself had once been a grand hall, if the fractured pillars and remnants of mosaic flooring were anything to judge by. Now it was little more than a hollowed carcass of blackened stone, the air perpetually cold no matter the season outside. She had chosen this place deliberately. The Witch had torn the veil here; the scar in the world remained faintly visible to Farah’s angelic sight, like a seam poorly stitched. It seemed only logical that the wound might be reopened. And yet, logic did not quiet the faint, gnawing suspicion that she had overlooked something important.
Palindromic magic thrummed faintly in the sigils carved into the stone floor around her. The most powerful form of magic known to mortals, and the most dangerous. Language that folded in upon itself. Meaning that mirrored meaning. A phrase that began and ended the same, binding intent in perfect symmetry. It was not raw power that made it supreme, but inevitability. When spoken correctly, reality struggled to disagree.
She had not needed anything particularly rare, which bothered her most of all.
Palindromic magic was, in theory, the highest and most dangerous form of spellcraft known to mortals. It required symmetry not only of phrase but of intent, will, and sacrifice. Words that read the same forward and backward were merely the skeleton; the true structure was built upon balance. A spell cast in such a manner demanded something of equal weight from the caster.
But Farah could draw upon it with disquieting ease. All she had required was the incantation which she carefully composed over weeks of study, studying the intent of destination, and suitable catalysts. The blood of a god would have been ideal, but she was no goddess, nor could she in good conscience demand such a thing from the Triumvirate in their weakened state. They were still recovering, their divine light dimmed and distant after the war. So she had turned instead to monsters.
For months she scoured marsh and mountain, forest and ruin. She harvested ichor from abyssal wyrms, marrow from grave-spawned colossi, venom glands from cathedral-sized arachnids that remembered older suns. She purified what she could, distilled what she could not, and learned how to make the disparate essences resonate with one another. The mixture had smoked when combined. It had tried to crawl from its container.
Four years had passed since the Witch’s defeat. Four years since Umbra had vanished beyond the veil. Four years of ruling, praying, researching, and pretending that patience was a virtue she possessed in abundance.
Now, as she stood before the portal, that patience felt thin and brittle.
She held her prayer book in one hand, the worn leather cover familiar beneath her fingers. The other hand smoothed the front of her robes, an unconscious gesture meant to steady herself more than to correct any imperfection in her appearance. The white fabric caught faintly on the uneven stone beneath her boots, and her wings, half unfurled in anticipation, brushed the air behind her with a soft rustle.
She told herself that this was no different than stepping through a doorway. It was a lie, but a comforting one.
With a slow breath drawn deep into her lungs, she offered a final, silent prayer. It wasn’t for safety, but for resolve. Then, before doubt could take root, she stepped forward and allowed herself to fall into the waiting light.
The sensation that followed was, if she were being entirely honest, the second worst experience of her forty-five years of life.
The worst had been watching Umbra disappear.
This was different, but not by much. There was no violent tearing and no dramatic sense of her body being ripped apart. Instead, she felt as though she were being claimed by a multitude of weak, insistent hands. They pulled at her from every conceivable direction: upward, downward, inward, outward. It was as though the concepts of up and down dissolved almost immediately. It was not pain in the conventional sense, it was a dreadful, pervasive wrongness that filled her every being.
She felt stretched without elongating, compressed without shrinking. The comparison that drifted through her mind, absurd though it was, was that of being handled by a dozen hands made of gelatinous pudding. The sensation was soft and yielding, yet entirely inescapable. Each tug lacked strength on its own, but together they created an inescapable pressure that left her feeling pathetically manipulated, as though she were no more than dough being kneaded by invisible cooks.
Worse still was the absence of everything else.
She saw nothing. Not darkness, not light, simply the absence of sight.
She heard nothing. No rush of wind, no echo of her own breath.
She felt no temperature, no texture, nor any sense of the air against her skin.
It was as though the universe had politely excused itself and left her suspended in a conceptual gap between moments.
She fell, or at least she believed she fell. The sensation of descent persisted even when she tried to orient herself, but there was no ground to approach and no sky to retreat from. Time, too, seemed to unravel, and she could not tell if she had been drifting for seconds or hours. Her thoughts stretched languidly, each one taking an indeterminate span to form and dissolve.
For the first time since beginning her research, a thin thread of fear wound its way through her composure.
What if she had misunderstood the Witch’s method? What if this space between worlds was not a corridor but a trap?
She clutched her prayer book tightly, though she could not feel its weight. She focused inward, on the steady rhythm of her own heart and the distant, faint warmth of divine grace still nestled within her soul. If nothing else, she would cling to that.
She had chosen to act rather than wait, something she held resolve to.
Then, after what felt like an insurmountable stretch of time in which her thoughts had begun to fray at the edges and even her sense of self had thinned to something brittle and uncertain, she saw something ahead of her. At first she feared it was another illusion conjured by the passage between worlds, another cruel distortion meant to lure her deeper into nothingness, but as she strained what little perception she still possessed, she realized that it remained constant. It did not flicker. It did not warp. It simply was.
It was a light.
Not a grand celestial radiance like that of the Triumvirate, nor the blazing fury of divine wrath, but a steady and undeniable glow that seemed to promise solidity, gravity, and blessed sensation. It shone like a distant lantern glimpsed across a storm-tossed sea, and in her desperation she latched onto it with all the fervor of a drowning sailor sighting shore.
Eagerly—far more eagerly than she would have admitted under any other circumstance—she reached toward it, pouring her will into forward motion. If this was an exit, if this was the end of the suffocating unreality that had swallowed her, then she would embrace it without hesitation. She could endure pain. She could endure shock. She could endure almost anything, so long as it meant the horrid, formless falling would finally cease.
The light grew larger. Warmer. More defined.
Relief swelled within her chest so sharply that it almost felt like joy.
Then she slammed into something.
The impact was not graceful, nor was it divine in any meaningful sense. It was abrupt and humiliatingly physical. She collided with what felt like stone, yet not stone as she understood it. It was strangely slick and faintly adhesive, as though the surface had been polished by countless strange hands or coated in some invisible residue. The force of the collision drove the air from her lungs in a violent rush, and for a terrible instant she could neither inhale nor exhale. Pain erupted throughout her body in bright, flashing bursts, and she was certain—absolutely certain—that she felt the unmistakable splintering of bone in more than one place.
Yet even as agony flared, her angelic nature asserted itself. Warmth flooded her limbs like liquid sunlight, and she felt the fractured pieces of herself knit back together with quiet efficiency. Bones slid into proper alignment. Cracks sealed. Torn flesh smoothed as though time itself had been commanded to retract a few precious seconds. The pain dulled, though it did not vanish entirely, leaving her trembling and disoriented upon the unfamiliar surface.
What troubled her far more than the lingering ache, however, was the sound.
Noise crashed over her in a chaotic tide the very moment sensation returned fully to her senses. It was not the solemn toll of cathedral bells nor the distant rumble of battle. It was a thousand disparate sounds layered atop one another—high-pitched wails, deep mechanical roars, rhythmic thuds, sharp bursts like metallic thunder. Voices overlapped in rapid succession, speaking in tones that ranged from alarm to excitement to something she could not quite name.
The language itself struck her as deeply strange. The cadence was unfamiliar, the consonants clipped in peculiar ways, and yet… there were fragments that brushed against recognition. Certain words seemed almost adjacent to her own tongue, like distant cousins separated by generations of linguistic drift. She could not understand them, not truly, but she felt an uncomfortable sense that she should.
With a shaking arm, Farah pressed her palm against the sticky stone and attempted to rise. The effort was far more taxing than she expected. Her limbs felt heavy, as though gravity itself were different here, calibrated to a world that had never known wings. For a moment she wavered, her vision swimming dangerously as the overwhelming sensory assault threatened to force her back down onto her front. Pride and stubbornness, however, had carried her through far worse than disorientation, and she refused to greet this new world sprawled helplessly upon its ground.
Slowly, with painstaking determination, she pushed herself up onto her knees.
The sight that met her eyes nearly sent her collapsing once more.
She had expected desolation, or perhaps some twisted reflection of her own realm shaped by the Witch’s influence. Instead, she beheld a landscape that was unmistakably inhabited, and yet utterly alien. Towering structures of glass and steel loomed in every direction, rising so high that they seemed to challenge the heavens themselves. They were too smooth, too symmetrical, too impossibly tall to be the work of any mundane masonry she had ever witnessed. Their surfaces gleamed and reflected the light of a sun that felt subtly different from her own.
The air carried unfamiliar scents, acrid and metallic, and beneath it all thrummed a constant vibration, as though the very ground were alive with restrained energy.
And the people.
There were so many people.
They stood in clusters along wide, dark stone pathways marked with strange white sigils. They wore garments of cut and color unlike any fashion of her Queendom. Tight-fitting fabrics, bright dyes, odd accessories that glinted in the light, though none bore horns, none carried visible weapons and all were a somewhat uniform height, with some outliers. They were, as far as she could tell, entirely human, and every single one of them was staring at her.
Mouths hung open, hands clutched small rectangular objects that they pointed toward her as though in accusation. Some seemed frozen in shock, others animated in alarm. A few stepped backward as though she were some apparition risen from myth.
Before she could process all of this though, the strange tall buildings that kissed the sky, the strange people in strange clothing, Countessa Farah Celestinia Valessine Mariselle Steelblight, was hit by a bus.