I

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

The temple shook, and Wilburn staggered, narrowly avoiding falling to the hot stone floor. It had begun. The chanting crowd marched up the steps of the hexagonal ziggurat, one step per syllable, the space between them shrinking with each concentric tier. By the time they reached the penultimate tier, a step down from the pavilion, the shoulders of their striped robes were almost brushing. There, the chanters halted and allowed the Category-Q to enter the temple first. The instant the golden blob crossed into the invisible circle, Wilburn and Iddo’s private thought-channel slammed shut. 

Suddenly, Wilburn was alone. He became uncomfortably aware of the eyes of the Girl in Black targeting him from across the temple. She and he were the only people in the circle. Was Iddo’s shield still protecting him? No. Wilburn could feel that it wasn’t. There was nothing stopping the Girl in Black from mind-pummeling him to putty. So why didn’t she attack? Wilburn sensed nothing from the intimidating stranger. But of course, she knew how to shield—unlike him. He tried to swallow. His throat had gone very, very dry. How could your Astro avatar get a dry throat? He wished he could ask Iddo. 

Wilburn could see Iddo, whose fur shone bluish in the moonlight, floating next to Alfajean and Buttrom, above and slightly behind the ring of chanters. They had obviously flown up to get a better view. They were close enough to have had a conversation with Wilburn in ordinary tones if there hadn’t been the several hundred hooded people chanting,

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

to sonically compete with. As it was, Wilburn would’ve had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard, and he felt very strongly that he didn’t want to do that. He saw Iddo turn and say something to Alfajean. The angel flashed a golden thumbs-up to Wilburn; Iddo nodded. Wilburn nodded back. In spite of his nerves, he couldn’t help grinning at the expression on Buttrom’s face—a discordant mixture of bewilderment, anxiety, despondency, and consternation. Iddo or Alfajean or both of them were making Buttrom fly, and he didn’t seem to be enjoying the experience as much as Wilburn had. 

The Category-Q glided toward the altar, passing within a few feet of Wilburn, who took the opportunity to gaze into its translucent amber depths. He could see straight through it. The blobby surface acted as a lens, warping and yellow-tinting the world on the other side. The Q was about two-thirds the size of Iddo, lumpily egg-shaped, and beautiful. Wilburn sniffed curiously. An alluring aroma hung about the Q, as delicious as the brimstone was revolting. It reminded him of lemon meringue pie… plus the cool morning smell of dewdrops on flower petals. He wanted to run over and take a big bite of it. But he resisted the temptation, and the Q glided away toward the altar, where the Girl in Black’s blacker-than-black knife lay waiting.

The glowing blob rose above the altar and ascended one, two, three hundred feet at least to the vaulted ceiling, right to the center of the mandala of hexagons. At this distance the Q became a golden pearl, the crowning jewel of the architecture. The building quaked again, and this time Wilburn fell hard. He’d been caught flat-footed, staring upward with his neck craned back, and he managed to whack just about every piece of himself on the floor except his head. It hurt—like, for real. 

But… hadn’t Iddo said he they were Astro projecting? Wasn’t this Parallelogram Space or whatever? Hadn’t Iddo said nothing could hurt you on the Astro Plane except magic and you could even go swimming in lava if you wanted to? Iddo had said all these things, of course. Iddo couldn’t be… wrong… could he? 

Wilburn picked himself up off the floor and turned to Iddo with an imploring gaze. The yak gave him another small nod, which could’ve meant just about anything. Anything… Anything was what Wilburn would’ve given to hear Iddo’s thought-voice in his mind right then. But he had nothing to give anybody, and all he heard was:

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

II

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

The black cage flew into the circle next. It was yikes big. Wilburn couldn’t see inside. The bars were thick and the gaps between them very thin. The cage was practically a solid iron box. Whoever built the thing hadn’t been taking any chances. And the light falling from the Category-Q only served to cast the interior deeper into shadow. 

The cage must have weighed tons. Yet it floated with the same easy grace as the Q, following its path across the temple to the altar, which would have given Wilburn an excellent opportunity to peer in through the bars had he not backed hastily away to edge of the pavilion. This put him uncomfortably close to the chanting people, who were eerily faceless under their striped hoods—all except the Yellow Guy, who was eerily faceless under his yellow hood. He was clearly a man, an ultra-muscular man, like the heroes in the mythic tales Mom sometimes told—Mom was very descriptive about the heroes’ muscles for some reason. Yellow Guy’s yellow robe was a tad too-small for his physique, which made him seem less creepy than the others, like a big kid who’s outgrown his old clothing. The other chanters, though… yeah, those guys were creee-py. Sickos. But they weren’t whatever was in the cage, and that was all that mattered at the moment. 

The floor trembled under Wilburn’s bare feet. The stone was almost painfully hot now. This time, the trembling didn’t stop; it wasn’t bad enough to make him lose his balance, but it set every nerve in his body, well, his Astro avatar, to jangling. It was just like standing in a boat—what Wilburn considered a boat most people would’ve called a raft—and the unsteadiness did little to assuage his increasing apprehension that the situation was not under control. Or… not under the control of the good guys, anyway. 

The cage flew up over the altar and began to ascend vertically toward the Q. Wilburn dared a quick glance at the Girl in Black. She wasn’t paying any attention to him now; her dark eyes were fixed on the iron box. She didn’t look nearly as scared as he felt, but there was something in her face… a tiny hint of alarm behind her hard, pissed-off expression. Seeing it made Wilburn extra scared. Anything that posed a threat to her would pose a thousand-times worse threat to him. What was in the cage? He needed to know, and he desperately didn’t want to find out.

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Where had the the Girl in Black’s evil bodyguard, the tall, rune-covered demon, gone? Wilburn couldn’t see it anywhere. He hated that—knowing the thing lurked somewhere in the shadows—or maybe it could turn invisible. The demon had left the circle shortly after their encounter. After that, Wilburn had lost track of it. It wasn’t allowed to come inside the circle during the ritual, Alfajean had said… All of a sudden, the circle seemed the safer place to be. Wilburn edged back toward the middle just a bit, even though this brought him closer to the altar and the iron cage floating above it. 

The cage blocked out the Q-light now. The temple was very dark. In the moonlight all was colorless. Something big was about to happen. The floor trembled underfoot like a beast awakening from slumber. And the pressure… that restless tension in the air… that feeling of a balloon inflated almost to the point of bursting and still going… still going… but it couldn’t hold much longer. No way. The energy was too intense. The BANG was coming any second now. Any second now. 

Any second now…

Wilburn was sweating. His Astro avatar was pitting out. He didn’t think that was supposed to happen.

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Three hundred feet above the altar, the cage began to tip. It rotated slowly on a horizontal axis, ten degrees… twenty degrees… thirty… At forty-five degrees, the iron door swung open with a scream of un-oiled hinges. The cage began to shake and pitch, as if whatever monster it contained was scrambling around inside, likely trying to resist the tug of gravity. It was a doomed attempt, for the cage continued tipping, tipping… sixty… seventy… eighty degrees, and then…

BANG

III

Two things happened simultaneously. The monster fell, dumped from its cage, and Yellow Guy sprinted into the circle. He sprinted for the altar. He ran like no one Wilburn had ever seen. The monster plummeted, flipping and thrashing through the air. It was enormous—far bigger than its cage. Some awful magic must have been used to make it fit. Now it was free, and freefalling, and the iron cage was gone; where it went, Wilburn never knew, nor did he care. Somebody was screaming—him. His worst nightmare, his very worst, was coming true before his eyes. 

It was a giant serpent, midnight black. Its scales glittered in the unobstructed Q-light. It fell, whipping in mighty loops, as Yellow Guy lunged for the altar, for the knife the Girl in Black had tossed there so disdainfully, the knife whose blade was like a fissure in reality. It had looked big enough to qualify as a small sword when the Girl in Black was holding it; now, next to the immensity of the foe, it was clearly no more than a toothpick. Yellow Guy was history. He dove flat onto the altar, stretching to grasp the knife, his hand closing around its hilt just as the giant snake crashed down on top of him. 

Rubble sprayed, and a great cloud of dust woofed up. The impact rocked the temple, launching Wilburn off his feet. He didn’t feel the fall. He was in full-blown panic mode. Towering waves of black scales crested overhead and hammered down upon the temple floor in thunderous cacophony. The serpent was a thrashing tangle of lightning-quick motion, beneath which Yellow Guy must be little more than a smear of red. 

But no—a flash of yellow—there he was! Leaping above the raging serpent, a leap no normal man could dream of, raising the black knife high, his hood blowing back to reveal a bald, square head, an open mouth. Unbelievably, Yellow Guy was chanting. His lips shaped the syllables, though his voice could not be heard above the crowd. For a sliver of a second he hung stationary at the top of his arc, poised, a terrible blankness in his face. 

Then he swung the knife down in a sweeping slash, and the serpent’s blood sprayed like a fountain. Yellow Guy had cut it clean in two, and both pieces bucked madly, slamming against the floor over and over, flinging blood in all directions. Some splattered Wilburn’s face, hot and metallic-smelling. Yellow Guy was Red Guy now. The knife, oddly, remained spotless. Red Guy sprang nimbly to evade the snapping fangs, each of which was as long as his arm. He flipped backwards and landed with a somersault, rolling his momentum into an upward slash—

Thud.

Red Guy had done it, just like that. The severed head of the great serpent rolled on the floor. The jaws bit viciously at nothing. The awful, tiny eyes glared evilly. The serpent didn’t act dead—but it was. It had to be dead. Yet there was no applause. There were no cheers. There was only, as there had been all along, the chant, relentless, reverberating through the temple.

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

IV

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Red Guy proceeded to chop the serpent into a total of six pieces, all six of which flopped independently around the temple, slapping and splashing in the growing lake of blood like monstrous black macaroni noodles. Wilburn was forced to keep moving around to avoid getting flopped upon. The stench of death was overpowering. He staggered dazedly through hot, slick puddles. He might have been blubbering. Some puke might have been dribbling off his chin. He seemed to be outside himself, observing the goings-on without particular awareness of his own involvement. 

That summer, Wilburn had watched Mom behead a rattlesnake in the garden with the shovel—he’d watched her out the kitchen window, too frightened of the snake to leave the cottage. The rattler’s death had also been a lengthy, kinetic affair, a gradual trickling away of life despite the swiftness of its decapitation. It had taken a good half-hour for the tail to quit buzzing and the head to quit chomping. Wilburn had stared, in horrified fascination, until the carcass twitched its last and finally lay still in the dirt. Even then, even after Mom had dug a hole and buried the rattler’s head so nobody would step on it, Wilburn had kept vigil at the window until dusk. He just knew the creature was going to come back to life, and make its way into the cottage. The snake would find him in the middle of the night and slither in under his blankets, and he would wake up to the feeling of its dry, papery scales sliding up the leg of its pajamas, and then he’d hear that terrible buzzzzzz, right before it sank its fangs into his flesh. Mom—insanely—had wanted to cook and eat the thing, and make a belt out of its skin and wear it. It had taken a lot of begging on Wilburn’s part to get her to see reason. Mom had told him he was being silly; a dead snake couldn’t come back to life. But Wilburn had been certain that it would; and in the end, Mom had pitched the carcass in the creek, and they had watched the current carry it downstream and out of sight. Even so, Wilburn slept poorly that night. Now… well, it was going to be a miracle if he ever slept again.

Across the temple, he saw Red Guy approach the Girl in Black, who, like Wilburn, had been splattered in blood. Red Guy towered over her for a moment, then dropped to one knee. He bowed his head, presenting the black blade across the flat of his palms. The mysterious girl took it from him wordlessly. Her expression was distrusting. She slid the knife back into its sheath, but kept her hand resting on its hilt. She was left-handed, like Wilburn—not that Wilburn noticed. He did come to his senses enough to look around for Iddo and Alfajean, who were right where they’d been earlier, but much harder to see now. The angel’s light seemed to have dimmed. Or was it that the Category-Q was getting brighter…? It was that. Wilburn glanced up and had to squint immediately. The golden jewel had grown dazzlingly, almost blindingly bright. 

Six chanters in black-and-yellow striped robes moved into the circle now, one from each corner of the pavilion. They stepped in unison, first with their left feet, then their right, and the moment their right feet touched down in the circle—RUMBLE—the floor pitched, spilling Wilburn to the bloody stone. He flailed upright, disgusted, as one of the six chanters came gliding past him. They were each carrying a golden chalice, a huge empty cup wrought in the shape of a hexagonal prism with a different colored gem set in each side, ordered yellow, red, blue, green, purple, black. The bearers held the chalices so that the black gems pointed toward the altar—or what was left of it—a heap of boulder-sized fragments drenched in blood. Around this, the bearers converged and, raising their vessels overhead, knelt—full knelt—submerging both knees in the lake of blood and bowing forward until their hoods pressed to the floor, stretching out their cups like beggars. Six droplets of blood fell upward and outward from the altar. Six more droplets followed them. Six more. Six more. Six dotted lines of blood flew in symmetric rainbow arches up from the stone and down into the waiting chalices, filling them to half. 

Then, golden rain began to sprinkle from on high. The Category-Q was melting. Tiny droplets of amber light poured down in a glimmering column upon the rubble of the altar. The glowing fluid streamed over the kneeling chanters, splashing in the serpent’s blood, both in the chalices and on the floor, the crimson and the gold mixing in incredible branching spirals. And there was that wonderful aroma again, like lemon meringue pie on a spring morning. At the smell of it, Wilburn’s heart filled with unexpected hope. Strength. Inspiration. His eyes widened. His fingers curled into fists. Control. Wilburn hungered for that honey. Starved for it. Honey… yes… yes and no. It was something similar to honey… only much, much better. 

Wilburn found himself stepping forward into the glittering rain. It fizzed gently on his skin, cool and warm at the same time. Every droplet was a kiss. He closed his eyes. He tilted his head back, his arms raising of their own volition. He opened his mouth, and tasted heaven. Salvation. Wilburn was healed. He was cleansed. He felt the feeling he’d been longing to feel all his life without knowing it. Peace. He could die anytime now and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing important would be lost. 

Wilburn opened his eyes and saw, across the wreckage of the altar, the girl—could it really be the same girl? She was the Girl in Gold now. She was utterly transformed. Amber beads sparkled in her dark, untamed curls. She was gazing upward, uncaring that honey-rain fell in her eyes. Her fighter’s posture had gone loose… and her face… Wilburn saw wonder there, and joy. The shining liquid flowing down her dark cheeks made it appear that she was crying—or maybe she really was. She seemed to have become a different person, possibly even… a good person. The honey-rain had rinsed away her anger, just as it had rinsed out Wilburn’s fear. Where had the scary girl who traveled with a demon gone? This girl was awesome. This girl he wanted to hang out with. She looked at him. The golden light was in her eyes—truly in them, not just reflected on the lenses—beautiful facets of gold intermeshing with the brown rays of her irises. Wilburn could see her seeing him too, as if for the first time, seeing him as he was seeing her… a better version of himself… the best version. We’re sharing this. Yes. Whatever this magic moment was, they were together in it. 

As they faced each other in the falling light across the ruins of the altar, neither noticed the tendril of gold spiraling out across the crimson lake, spiraling toward the place where the severed head of the great serpent lay, gnashing feebly and leaking its final measure of life’s blood. Neither noticed the black tongue lick out and dip its forked tip in the swirling honey, nor the twin sparks of golden light flaring to life in the serpent’s eyes. 

They smiled mystical smiles at one another. There was a snarling hiss. Wilburn spun just in time to see his worst nightmare hurl itself toward him, launching off the floor with a mighty thrust of lower jaw. The bloody fangs parted to frame a red throat, as the serpent’s mouth hinged open like the doorway to a dungeon.