The Lightbearer chuntered across the vast woodland of Virgoda like one of the great serpents of ancient Sumyr, only this serpent was forged from metal, fire, and ingenuity. He had a carriage to himself—the night-trains were quieter—which suited him well, for though he had donned relatively fine clothes, and concealed his abnormalities, still he felt his dark purpose roiling like a personal stormcloud that went before him, shadowing men’s souls.

  As the Engine hurtled inland, into the heart of Virgoda, following tracks laid four-hundred years ago by the first, canny settlers of what would become the Aurelian Empire, his thoughts and consciousness roamed, aided by the interconnected web of the Daimonic Mind.

  He had come to realise certain abnormal truths of the Daimonic condition. For example, none of the Daimons possessed names, for they were all One. Yet, each was an individual entity, and could act out of its own will. The paradox was painful, his mortality resisting such a notion, but he was growing accustomed to it with each hour that bled by. He wondered whether any Daimon had ever rejected or defied the collective. He supposed that for beings who grew up with their minds interwoven and linked with the whole, ostracisation would be just as terrible as death.

  Rifling through the memories of the Other whom he carried with him, he found that Daimons were able to reproduce with other Daimons, though the process was fraught with peril, and not often successful. The initial form of the Daimon-child depended on the form of the Daimonic pair who united themselves. But of course, all Daimons were born with the blood—the ever vital, immortal blood—that granted them the power to shift their shapes.

  Like any living thing, Daimons grew as they aged—and there was no limit to how large they might become. However, they grew most rapidly by feeding, not merely by the passage of time. Their size also determined their mental powers. Thus, the Daimon who currently resided beneath the bay of Wylhome was an old and powerful Daimon, one who had rapidly metastasized in the deep feeding on the creatures that dwelt in the lower reaches of the ocean, and accrued to itself significant powers of transformation and alacrity. Through its senses, The Daimoniac could detect the movements of the people on land above: how they feared, raged, grieved; how they ran. Such destructive power, he thought. He could not deny he longed for such power, also.

  You shall have it, the Daimon within him answered. You shall not die. Your flesh shall not wither. We shall grow, and you shall learn, in time, to harness the blood to change yourself.

  It was a dizzying thought, a possibility he had never once dreamt of. His world had been orientated entirely towards the human sphere, and anything outside of that sphere—such as the theronts—had been something to eliminate. Now, he was part of a Daimonic collective, his flesh changed into that of a shape-shifter, a monster. He was not part of the human story, anymore. He had transcended it.

  But there was something that kept him tethered to the human realm, a task left unfinished, a mission yet unaccomplished.

  Telos.

  He sensed the Daimon’s anger stirring, and he quickly banished any further thought. He had told them that he would abandon Telos to their plan. But secretly, when the hatred within him grew too great to conceal, he returned to the Shell within, the strange, cold mind-palace, and vented his fury and loathing and shame into that void, where his Daimonic parasite could not see. I will get you, Telos. I will find you and kill you and set right what is so wrong.

  The Engine rattled on. People occasionally passed him, moving listlessly from one carriage to another, although where they were going or why was anathema to him. Outside, the landscape was slowly changing, the huge pine forests of Virgoda giving way to rolling plains that stretched to the horizon. Farm fields. Wild flower fields. The abundance was astonishing. He thought of the pitiful gardens of Yarruk and realised how small his life had been. He had not left Ob-koron for decades. But even before then, he had been a soldier, who had lived his life in scummed trenches and bloodsoaked parlours. He had not tasted the world. Not since Iliyet died.

  But when all is done, I will dance through the world, he thought. I will not merely write poetry, but become the poem. He saw now how his poems were an intellectualisation of his true heart’s craving, a craving he could not have fulfilled in his mortal body. But now he was immortal, ever-changing, elemental. Like the visions he was receiving piecemeal of the world’s beginning, of the first Daimons dancing through the beauties of nubile Erethia, he would become pure song.

  Yes, now you see what we are, now you see what was taken from us.

  Eventually, the fields began to fall away, replaced by clusters of tiny settlements. The Engine did not stop at these small stations, but continued on, until he was passing thick, fortress walls. A vast city suddenly loomed up around him. Even through the glass windows of the Engine he could smell the smoke and Daimsonblood. The city was unlike Gorgosa or any city he had seen before. Though he had heard of Daimonpolis, he had not understand it until he saw with his own eyes.

  A stone-wrought metropolis stretched farther than his eye could see. The streets were organised by grids, and Engines thundered to and fro across the city, some passing so close together it seemed certain they would collide. The atmosphere was a black smog. The buildings were soot-stained and fire-blackened. And yet, diademic lights shone all around from metal-wrought lamps fed by the furious blood. Huge pipes carried gurgling rivers of blood to titanic factories. Rivers ran through the city of blackly steaming fuel. So many brothers here, so many dead, their lifeblood used up. The Daimoniac detected a note of sorrow, of grieving in the Daimon within him. It sobered him to know such an eternal creature could yet feel loss.

  The majority of buildings were towers. What homes there were had been built from some strange stone that apparently could be warped like clay. Metal structures supported another level of the city that hung overhead, a disconcerting mirage that floated on girders and black smoke-clouds.

  The noise of the city was a wound on his heightened senses. He clapped his hands over his ears and focused inward until the throbbing pain subsided. He gasped for air.

  The cities of the Daimons were multitudinous, but beautiful, the Daimon whispered. They were great, and quiet, filled with wondrous works.

  “Where were they?” the Daimoniac asked.

  Why, in Memory, of course.

  He saw them, flashing before his inner eye: the purple jungles, with white towers rising from their canopies to touch the clouds, faces of no human feature sculpted upon their flanks, overlooking the sprawl of godlike spires with the majesty of lucid dreams.

  He opened his eyes, startled and awed. The murk of Daimonpolis greeted him again.

  The Engine chugged and sputtered, slowing as it arrived before a stone platform. It was time for him to disembark. From here, he would have to take another train, possibly in the morning, to go onward across Virgoda and into Tezada. On the eastern side of Tezada, he would find a port-town and either take a ship to Memory or swim.

  He stepped down from the train amidst the ant-like activity of the men and women all around him. He felt more like a ghost than a man. They did not see him, did not sense what he was. He saw through them, to their deepest and darkest fantasies, written in the hieroglyphic language of sweat, tears, and blood.

  He moved silently out of the station, presented his ticket to the stationmaster, was allowed to depart without so much as a glance. I was a man of legend in Yarruk, he thought. People knew me, knew me as the one who culled the theront threat. They feared and revered me. Here, I am nothing.

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  Aurelia, with its relentless drive towards progress, had left him far behind. Forty years was a millennia here.

  He found a street, lined with the blood-fed lamps. Though it was dark, the city was roiling with activity. Houses stood with their doors open like huge, paralysed beasts. Men and women in strange fashions went to and fro on carts that were driven by no horses, but by some miniature Engine that chugged and spat and reeked of foul earth and age.

  He needed a place to stay for the night, and so he headed towards the nearest House, named The Cart Without Horses. He found something discomforting about that name, but he would not let him stop him turning in for the night. Even Daimonically charged as he was, he needed rest, and it had been a days since he slept properly.

  He passed a couple leaning against a wall, speaking in confidence. The woman wore a gaudy dress, and the man a high, black hat. They discussed gossip in hushed tones.

  “Did you see the dragons pouring in?” the man in the top hat said.

  “I did! My friend Alesha works at the dragonport, cleaning the dragons and suchlike—they pay good money for that kind of work, because of the danger, but apparently Alesha says the dragons are so well trained there’s no danger in it at all. Anyway, she said one of the dragonriders said something about Wylhome being flooded. Rogue wave, it was. Smashed the city to pieces.”

  “How terrible.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, though her tone was chirpy and cheerful. “Awful. Apparently, there was a second wave, even bigger than the first. That’s when the dragonriders took off.”

  “Shouldn’t they have evacuated the citizens?”

  “Apparently there weren’t many left.”

  “Gods…” The man began to intone a soft prayer to Lileth, to protect her followers with love and devotion.

  The Daimoniac could not bear it any longer; he stepped out of the shadows and approached the couple, looking into the man’s eyes with his brilliant, gemstone gaze.

  “It makes one wonder, does it not, how benevolent the gods can truly be when they let such suffering occur? It seems to me your prayer falls on deaf ears. Or is it simply the case that you pray to alleviate your own conscience? Better to tell me your sins. For in my homeland, I carry the power to absolve—or punish.”

  The man recoiled, his eyes darting to The Warden’s bare feet, then to the intensity of his face, struggling to reconcile his mode of speech with his dress and the signs of madness etched into his countenance.

  The Warden smiled. “Have a pleasant evening.”

  He left them, heading to the door of the House.

  ***

  It cost him all his remaining Relics to book a room for the night, but he was not concerned, for he could easily garner more. What troubled him more was that the hunger was growing within him again. Soon, he would need to feed once more. Maybe not tonight, but in the morning, certainly. The innkeeper, seemingly taking pity on him, had given him a free broth and ale with his room, which he had greedily devoured. But he found that neither satisfied his hunger or thirst. His body was capable of processing them, but they held no succour or nutrients.

  Blood, the Daimon whispered. It is only blood now, fresh, flowing blood, that can sustain you. The blood is the life.

  He gritted his teeth, tried to lie still, close his eyes, fall asleep. But sleep was elusive. Images of Iliyet kept arising before him, smiling—before she crumbled to dust. He tossed and turned, but could never be comfortable, a fever was on him, and the hunger was like a wound in his mind, wrenched wider and wider by the hands of a torturer. How often he had seen men writhe on the torturer’s rack. How often he had administered cruelties to obtain confessions. Now his own mind tormented him with the same assiduous attention he had tortured others.

  He rose from his bed and stepped out into the night. At last, the evening had grown quieter, even the most hedonistic revellers seeking beds to rest. He saw the wall where the young couple had talked, and he thought about the dragonriders from Wylhome. Perhaps there was an opportunity in this.

  He turned east, in the direction of the dragonports. Though he was not familiar with the city, he could see the towers, crowned as they were with living dragons that sparkled under the starlight. Many had cowls over their heads, indicating they slept. Those that did not stirred restlessly, occasionally uttering guttural intonations that rivalled the roar of the Engines.

  It took him some time to actually reach the dragonports, for their were rail-lines running through the city, some of which could only be crossed as certain bridges or gates. And, paradoxically, the square, grid-based organisation of the city was anathema to his Yarulian sensibilities, where things were laid according to the shape of the land and the dictates of history.

  At last, he stood before a huge iron gate, fencing off the dragonport. The port was evidently closed. A single guard slumbered in a wooden lookout near the gate. He was about to vault the iron fence when he suddenly heard shuffling footsteps and mumbling.

  “Fucking disaster… disaster after disaster… That’s my fucking life!”

  The accent was Yarulian, and strangely familiar. The Daimoniac stepped into the shadows and observed with eyes keener than any owl’s.

  A drunkard slouched into view, a keg of some dire liquid in his slack fingers, his fur robes matted and stained with ale and wine and gods knew what else. His heavily jowled features seemed to be running off him, as though he were turning into the burning liquid he consumed.

  He was evidently a dragonrider, from his dress. But what is more, The Warden recognised him from Gorgosa. This was Gryll, the very man who had flown Telos and his conspirators across the Winedark Sea. By some bizarre quirk of Fate, their paths had crossed again.

  The Warden had often said in the past he did not believe in Fate, Luck, or Gods. He had come to believe in luck when he saw how many times Telos escaped him. His Daimonic ascension had forced him to acknowledge the reality of the gods, even though they were not gods in the true sense. But Fate had been the hold-out, the one he refused to believe in. But now, even that resolution crumbled. Destiny had to exist, to put him here and now, in proximity with the one who had allowed his prisoner to escape.

  As silent as Death, he stepped from the shadows. Gryll looked up, his rheumy eyes slowly acquiring dreadful clarity as he saw the half-familiar man before him. The gleaming scalp, the rabid eyes… Yet, addled as he was, the meaning escaped him. He gasped like a fish, tried to step backward but only succeeded in stumbling against the iron fence. It rattled, but the watchman did not wake.

  “Ill met by moonlight,” the Warden whispered.

  “Ill met indeed,” Gryll murmured. “I have no Relics or Demons left, if that is what you want. I have nothing in the world… except Pandora.”

  And I have use for your dragon, The Daimoniac suddenly thought. Great use. Why walk when you can fly?

  He knew dragons were not supposed to fly too far west, lest some primeval instinct took over and they abandoned their course, returning to Memory. But Memory was his ultimate destination, so what did it matter?

  “It’s Gryll, isn’t it?” The Warden said.

  The dragonrider nodded, terrified.

  “Y-you look familiar… But…” He rubbed his face, blinked. “You look like a man I saw die.”

  The Warden stepped closer.

  “I did die, Gryll. All that I was perished in the Winedark Sea. I am what was reborn from the ashes.”

  Gryll’s eyes widened, and finally the understanding his sodden brain had been seeking slid into place, like the groan of a rusted Engine gear at last turning.

  “You!”

  “Me and not me. Us, you might say.”

  The Daimon within him laughed.

  From the Daimoniac’s back unfurled two black eels of re-wrought flesh, their blind heads turning in the direction of Gryll, their mouths opening revealing rows of teeth fine as needles.

  “In the name of the gods,” Gryll whispered. “What are you?”

  The man who had once been known as The Warden smiled.

  “No gods,” he answered.

  And the black serpents shot forth.