The Warden hit the water first, but that did not save Telos. It was funny how matter was so inconstant. Liquid, apparently soft and malleable, became harder than granite when approached with enough velocity.

  Ribs cracked. His lungs decompressed. Something ripped out of place around his hip area. His fingers shattered. His eyes felt as though they had been pressed into the back of his skull. His ears rang and blackness and icy death crowded him.

  When he opened his eyes, the sting of the salt brought with it the surprise that he was still alive. But he knew it was not for long. There was no air in his lungs and he could he could not move.

  Beneath him, The Warden—in his heavy metal armour—sank down and down into a murkiness that Telos did not wish to dwell on.

  He tried to roll on his back, hoping thereby he might break the surface of the water and find air, but it was no use. His arms were broken in several places. Agony coursed through his body as though it’d substituted blood. He was deeper than he realised. The surface lay far above, a pale glimmer, more like a memory than a reality.

  This is it then, he thought. I leapt out of the fire and into water, and the water has done me. He had always been a survivor, but recent experience had wearied him. He carried the burden of guilt, of having ruined so many people’s lives because of his curse. He’d seen a way out, and he’d taken it. Now that he faced the actual end, however, he found himself wanting to live again. He’d even put up with porridge; anything to be alive.

  He thrashed, but the movement brought so much agony that he gasped. Saltwater flooded his lungs. The dim part of his brain that was still rational, somehow detached from all the suffering, observed that now he really did have mere seconds to live. He gagged, spluttered, drank down more water. He was drowning. After a fall like that, I’m going to drown. That’s almost funny.

  And then light.

  Terrible light speared through the gloom of the seawater, perforating it the way a surgeon’s blade perforates flesh. And then he felt something grip him, a force. The only way he could describe it was it was like the world’s gravity had been reversed.

  He was being drawn upward, limp as a fish in a fisherman’s net.

  He broke the surface of the water and coughed up a lung. The sea raged beneath him, as though angry to lose its prize. Still he floated, up and up, drawn by the power of the light.

  And then he was turning, the light turning him over the way said fisherman might inspect their prize. He saw, with wonder and horror intermixed, a gleaming metal sky-ship, much larger than the one Nereth had steered. It was a hulking thing, blacker, and with flames coruscating along its unnaturally smooth surface. There were what looked like cannons attached to it, though of a design unfathomable to him. A portal was opening, from which the light blazed. He was being drawn up into a golden room.

  He wanted to know more, to cry out. But at this point, pain and exhaustion and the cold of the sea were catching up with him. Darkness crowded like a swarm of flies. He blacked out.

  ***

  When he opened his eyes, he lay upon a metal slab. The room was bright—harshly so. Two figures stood over him. The first, he recognised. It was Danyil, the Sumyrian who had visited him in his hour of need, who had given him the quest to find the Nergal, which he had so selfishly ignored. He was dressed differently to the last time. Gone were the lustrous robes. Instead, he wore a skin-tight one-piece costume coloured with the insane jigsaw of motley. Despite wearing the garb of a court jester, a figure of comedy, there was something unsettling about Danyil’s new attire. He was too thin, for a start. It was like the clothes cleaved to a skeleton, rather than a man. His gaunt face, that yet carried that spark of semi-divine beauty, seemed more a mask than a true face, leading Telos to wonder what secrets he knew.

  Still, despite it all, Telos was glad to see a familiar face. The second figure, however, brought Telos no comfort. He was taller than Danyil, taller even than Nereth, a colossal giant who looked all of iron darkly wrought, like he had been assembled out of machine parts, mere traces of flesh remaining. A mask of black iron covered his mouth, emitting hisses and whirs, as though processing the air for his consumption. One eye was a gleaming lens that winked and shimmered as information pulsed across it. One arm was entirely mechanical, its outer cladding formed from some kind of black metal that crackled with a dance of lightning. Beneath his armour, forge-light glowed. A cape of deep, volcanic orange hung about the god’s shoulders like a mantle of volcanic magma—the fires of creation.

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  “The Lord of Iron… The World-shaper… B-Beltanus?” Telos said. He was no religious savant, but he remembered his lessons, and there was no other god whom this could be. How different to Nereth! And yet, there were similarities. Their height. The sense of their presence, which overawed the senses in a way that was subliminal, at the level of animal-instinct. The intensity of their gaze was similar, too, although with Beltanus’s mechanical eye, the effect was even more disquieting. Lines of a poem came back to Telos.

  “And Talon cast Beltanus down,

  down from the Golden Skies to Earthly Ground.

  And broken was he on the stone of Erethia.

  But lo, what Talon meant for evil,

  Great Destiny had wrought for good…”

  As legend had it, Talon had thrown Beltanus out of the sky and broken him, hence the need for his mechanical reconstitution. Telos now saw the evidence of the story in the god’s machinery. Telos only hoped that as he had also been thrown from the sky, the god might look kindly on him. But Beltanus’s face was even more impossible to read than Nereth’s, given his augmentations.

  Don’t think about Beltanus the Cuckold, Telos thought, desperately. Don’t think about the seventeenth verse. Oh Gods…

  “Is this the one you mentioned?” Beltanus said, ignoring Telos entirely and speaking to Danyil. His voice was so deep it made Telos shiver, an Engine gurgling on newly fed flame.

  “It is,” Danyil said, softly.

  Beltanus examined him with his unnatural, glass-like eye.

  “He has potential. But it appears my half-sister has tampered with him...” There was no visible mouth, but did Telos see the corners of Beltanus’s eyes crinkle as though he was smiling? That was far more unsettling than any grunt or growl. “Activate Godseed protocol. Administer the Fire.”

  Fire? Telos thought, with horror. Not the Fire. Not again!

  He tried to move, but found he was bound. Terror seized him.

  Then Danyil put a calming hand on his forehead.

  “Fear not, Telos. This is not the fire of ending, but of beginning. Though you shall burn, it is only to be born anew. The world is running out of time. Your race is running out of time. And so we must make you more than you are to help us stop the coming storm.”

  “What?” Telos cried in alarm. If this was Danyil’s idea of comfort, then it left much to be desired. “What do you mean my ‘race’ is running out of time?”

  Danyil looked once more and Beltanus and two shared a nod.

  “The Daimons are returning, Telos,” Danyil said. “Their destruction was not as absolute as we hoped. And there are those among our number, among the Rynu’nakar, who see an opportunity to rectify another mistake…”

  Telos’s eyes widened. He recalled the goddess bathing, the cold way she had pronounced his doom. In accordance with the Tablet of Law, I may not kill you for your crime. Therefore, I now pronounce your judgement of a different kind...

  “Nereth! She’s… she’s going to use the returning Daimons to destroy us!”

  Danyil nodded grimly.

  “But fear not. There are some among our number who remain sympathetic to your cause.”

  Telos looked at Beltanus, more machine than man, and wondered why he would ever side with humanity. Still, at least someone had.

  “Now you must lie down,” Danyil said. “The procedure is neither brief nor painless…”

  “Wait—” But Telos’s words were cut off as an unseen machine roared into life, and the ship and metal slab on which he lay began to tremble. The god and the Sumyrian began to intone a litany at once utterly alien and yet familiar, like something whispered to Telos in the womb. The lid of a black sarcophagus lowered over him. Telos looked about wildly as the words droned and murmured to the rhythm of an ancient song. Night descended over his awareness.

  “From the edge of the Void,

  to the Golden Skies.

  In the Art, we trust.

  From black fires rise!”