BOUND AND GAGGED, cloak barely covering her translucent flesh, Theda could only watch as one of the brigands castrated her man with a stiletto, then the other blew out his brains as he attempted to crawl away across the infertile soil.

“Cheer up now, Fair Daughter,” the man with the eyepatch said as he cleaned his knife against his thigh. “Weren’t much of a man in the first place.” His laughter grated against the stillness of the summer night.

Theda raised her head from the sand, where it had been pressed against the rusted edge of some unseen artifact—a shield maybe, or cuirass—and watched them sniff around the camp, drinking her wine, ripping apart her books, rifling through her satchel.

“What’s all this junk?” the other man said, his high-pitched voice mismatching his large frame. A wild black beard and layer of filth masked thespian good looks. He tossed aside a wooden box that only Theda’s nimble fingers could open, followed by a necklace with a wizened hand for a pendant, then hesitated when his hand fell on a complex brass device that glinted in the firelight. “Hey now, Handy, you ever seen the likes of this?”

“Don’t know what it is, but I reckon it’ll fetch a pretty penny,” Handy judged.

“How’s it work?” the man asked, trying without success to shift the interlocking dials around.

Theda’s response was muffled by the gag.

“What’s that she says?”

“How should I know? I told you there’s no need to gag her, Rufus. Take it off and let’s admire those sweet lips again. And give that doodad here.”

Rufus tossed the device to his partner, then trotted over. With bated breath, Theda watched where he stepped. The gag was so tight, Rufus had to cut it loose with a grimy blade procured from his boot. Along with it, he happened to saw off a lock of her curly blonde hair, which after some hesitation he pocketed, but not before glancing around as if to assure himself no one was looking.

Theda breathed a sigh of relief but winced at the pain radiating from the broken edges of her mouth. “It’s called an orrery,” she said. “It was designed to move on its own volition, a bit like a pocketwatch.”

“What’s that mean? ‘Orrer’-whatever?” Rufus asked as he approached Handy to have another look at the orrery. It was indeed shifting on its own, though at a nearly imperceptible pace.

“Perceive.” She turned her pale jade eyes up toward the dim russet mass of Athax suspended in the aether.

Both of the brigands followed her gaze, and Rufus scratched his louse-infested beard and asked, “Why is Athax so brown? Never seen it like that before.”

Handy put in a more poetic contribution: “Like he’s been swimming in shit.”

“And,” Theda inserted. “If you peer closely, you’ll notice Hellas is passing in front of it at this very moment, moving between Maya and Athax. It’s that purple bruise you see over one of Athax’s eyes.”

“I see it!” Rufus exclaimed with the childish pride of rudimentary accomplishment.

“If you check the orrery, you’ll see that it corresponds to the alignment occurring in the cosmos at this very moment. The turquoise orb represents us, Maya. The pearl, Hellas. The fat tourmaline, Athax. And the gold, Sola—”

“Gold?” Handy echoed, eyes ablaze as he turned the orrery about in his hands, admiring the play of firelight on its gleaming curves.

“Oh yes, it’s a priceless treasure, that orrery.”

“I reckon we can scrounge up a price for it,” Handy snickered.

“Yes, I’m sure a couple of resourceful gentlemen like yourselves won’t be cheated out of its true worth when you unload it on the black market.”

Rufus furrowed his brow at this, but Handy chortled, revealing that he was missing more than just one eye. “This one’s got quite the sense of humor, cracking wise right after watching us spay her husband.”

“Oh, that man was not my husband,” she said with a touch of irony neither man could decipher.

“What, I suppose you were just out here in the middle of nowhere, doing the donkey with some stranger.”

“You’re only half wrong. This is not nowhere; rather, it is the site of a very important historical event.” Theda winced. “Would you mind helping me to sit up? You must realize I won’t be able to run off in my current state, and right now my shoulder seems to be pressing against the point of a sword.”

“Go on,” Handy said, gesturing toward her with a nod of his head.

Theda held her breath again as Rufus lurched back over, barely missing the figures she had drawn in the sand. After shifting her up to a kneeling position, he exclaimed, “Hey! She wasn’t lying.” Then he reached into the sand and unearthed a long sword, perfectly whole but hopelessly rusted. “Piece of junk, though.” He tossed it back onto the ground.

“Wait, wait, wait. Pick it up and fetch it here.”

“You know what, Handsome Elbridge, you’re not the golden bloody governor. We’re partners here; you don’t get to boss me around.”

“Oh, a thousand apologies, Yer Majesty. Now hand me the fucking sword—please, Lord Master Doofus!”

Rufus grunted but obeyed without further remonstration. Tucking the orrery into an inner pocket of his threadbare coat, Handy snatched the sword from him and examined this newly discovered artifact with obvious interest, then asked his captive, “You said there was some event that occurred here, did you Little Daughter?”

Theda, who had been gazing into the bloodstained sand around the corpse of her amorous partner, replied in a monotone prickly with exotic consonants. “Therros andalox rehechearum.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Hmm? Oh, just a bit of poetry. Old Vaxan.”

“I asked you a question.” Handy hefted the sword, still heavy after so many years buried in the sand. “You said this place was important.”

Her response was automatic, as if Theda were reciting from a text. “One hundred years ago to this day, a battle was fought here during the height of the Great War. On that ridge over yonder, in the copse where you two were camping out looking for your next victim, the Royal Army had constructed a redoubt lined with many cannons, including the much-feared Iron Mammoth which was said to have destroyed the city of Five Manors in one single fiery burst from its great metal maw. General Staubert himself prowled the front lines on his indefatigable black steed Nightowl as he planned, with his advisers, a northward advance along the coast towards the capital in what would eventually be the Battle of Hemlock. Alerted to the plan by a double agent, the Rebels launched a surprise attack, hoping to cripple the Royal Army before their advance, striking from the west, from our current position, through a thick wood known as Moonmire, very difficult but unguarded terrain, which some folk believed was poisoned by the vapors of Athax.”

“And was it?” Rufus inquired, tossing the emptied satchel aside.

“Oh, of course not,” Theda said, then muttered, “Juros ilque grandililas.”

“What’s that?” Handy snapped, glancing up from the sword, her words jarring him back to attention.

“Nothing. Just more silly poetry.”

“Quit it with the poems, Fair Daughter, or the time has come for us to trade conversation for connubials.” He grinned with unmistakable lecherousness.

“Forgive me. I’ve read too many books in my life. The poems just leak out at times.”

“Wh-what happened? I mean, to the Rebels,” Rufus asked.

“Massacred, every single one, thousands and thousands of corpses blown to smithereens. The advance proceeded unchecked up the coast, morale boosted by this victory, into the largest battle ever known on the soils of Clairmont or anywhere else on Maya—but that’s another story entirely. Given the utter devastation, as intact as that sword is, I expect it will be worth something. All in all, this night is proving to be quite lucrative for you two.”

The crackle of the small fire peppered the silence that followed Theda’s tale.

“How you know so much, young as you are?” Rufus asked.

“My master taught me. I was a student of history and classics at the University of Hemlock.”

“Wait a second. That story can’t be true,” Rufus protested. “You said the Rebels come up through the woods. Well, I don’t see no trees. Nothing but gloom grass and sand here.”

“I suspect the Iron Mammoth might be the culprit.”

“Unlikely,” Rufus muttered, but gazed around at the barren field in which no cricket or mockingbird sang. His face wasilluminated by the murky eclipse light, with a searching expression and, Theda thought, a newfound sense of awe.

“Morum functil—”

“Hey!” Handy shouted, surging forward and brandishing the dull blade in her face. “I said cut it out with that poesy poppycock!”

“Apologies,” she said without so much as a flinch, her steady, pale eyes boring into him. “It’s a nervous tic of mine.”

Handy squinted at her. “What were you and your husband doing out here, anyway? So far from any town or settlement. No horse. It’s a bit suspicious, if you ask me.”

“I already told you: That man was not my husband.”

“Then who the bloody hell was he?”

“A warm male vessel. Morum functiliax compirearos.”

Face twisting in anger, Handy stove the hilt of the sword into Theda’s face, knocking her sideways into the rough sand. “I…said…no…bleeding…poetry!” he screamed, punctuating each pause with a kick to her face and chest and ribs.

By the end, Theda was giggling and groaning and spitting up blood and triangular shards of broken teeth onto the dead earth.

“Yes, that should be enough,” she managed with some difficulty through her split lips, her mangled face gleeful beneath the disordered curtain of her blood-matted curls.

“Enough?” Rufus whispered, his eyes wide with astonishment, shaking the memory of a scene from his childhood when his father had brutalized his mother for talking back. “Enough for what?”

“For the last line of the poem: Nephras saluqua extollioros.”

Handy unsheathed his long stiletto. “You just don’t learn, do you? And now, I’ll take that tongue of yours.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you. A tongue will only make it stronger. All I needed tonight was blood, but now with your help, I’ve given it so much more. Perceive.” She nodded her mutilated face toward the puddle of intermixed blood—hers and the dead man’s—which had started to bubble and smoke.

“What the hell?” Handy stumbled back a few paces.

“Mind your step,” she advised.

He lifted his foot from the sand and found that he had trod on a separate, smaller puddle of blood, which was also sizzling and had turned gelatinous and sticky, and had attached itself to the worn sole of his leather boot in long crimson tendrils. The severed gobs of Theda’s dead paramour’s manhood bubbled and divided and stretched, flopping and sliding about like hyperactive slugs.

Rufus screamed as Theda’s golden locks slid out of his pocket and coiled around his wrist, thickening by the second, polypy eyeballs and tooth-lined orifices sprouting along their length.

“Wh-wh-wha!” was all he could manage.

“The twin lunar eclipse,” Theda continued amidst the unfolding chaos. “The very same one that had happened in this spot one hundred years ago today. They have been yearning for this night, all those dead and restless souls; they have spoken to me for years, coming to me in the wee hours when I was bent over my books in the dusky library, distracting me from my studies to the point that my master lost faith in my abilities, my focus, and recommended my expulsion from the university. But at that point I didn’t care anymore. I had found new purpose, for they had promised me the might of armies if I could but open the Door to the Underworld. All it required was a key of four ingredients:

Freshest seed of the Son,

Bygone incantation,

Harmony of the stars,

Blood of fairest Daughter.”

The wind stirred, the ground trembled, and the rusted blade in Handy’s left hand began to shake violently, then it pinwheeled out of his grasp and stabbed into Theda’s arm. She screamed with hysterical pleasure, and a geyser of sand erupted from the ground in a blinding torrent as bits of bone and aged military relics surged past Handy and Rufus and pummelled and thrashed the young woman’s body. Theda’s screams could just be heard over the roaring cyclone, which raged for what seemed an interminable time.

Then she gagged and choked, and the night grew quiet once more.

Handy and Rufus, coughing and wincing from hundreds of glancing blows and cuts, rubbed the sand out of their eyes and peered through the thinning cloud that hung over the battlefield.

Where Theda had once stood, a dark lopsided mass of angles shifted and stretched, assembling upward until it towered several yards above the heads of the two men. They could hear the scrape of old metal, the groaning of wood, the clacking and snapping of bone, the rending of flesh, and the shower of dust as thousands of new joints ground together. Suddenly, the dim eclipse light brightened as the rim of Athax, the brighter of the two moons, shone beyond the shadow of Maya and bathed the creature in a shaft of blood-red light.

Theda still lived, in a way, though every inch of her translucent skin had been sheared from her body, traded with new parts, cobbled together from the armament of antiquity. Her legs had splintered into numerous stalks composed of the countless bones and spears of the dead rebels, webbed with her own stretched and shredded sinew. A tail like that of a scorpion, a long spinal column beaded with skulls rose above her, serving an unfathomable purpose. Her elongated ribcage was formed from the twisted barrels of interlocking rifles, the scaly shards of shattered shields, and the curves of broken armor, which fit together into massive scaly breasts and cochlear whorls. Her arms were run through with thousands of knives and swords, which extended and retracted like the long spiny claws of some undersea abomination. Strangest of all by contrast was her tiny head, the very same from before, though not nearly as pretty with its flesh stripped away, the once dreamy jade eyes now glowing nightmarishly.

Rufus, petrified, his mind broken, ceased struggling against the imp of hair that now bound up both of his arms. His jaw worked, the lips smacking, his beard quivering, but not a sound escaped his mouth. Then, with a great ripple of motion, Theda clacked forward on her stilt legs and descended upon him, forcing him up through a ravenous nether-mouth of milling bone and rust.

Shivers of satisfaction ran up her ponderous body, and she frowned in mock sympathy as she flexed one of her saber-spined appendages before Handy’s one goggling eye.

“Too bad for Rufus. He was mildly more palatable than you, Kind Father. Now, how should I express my gratitude to you for helping me complete the ritual?”

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