The moments to follow were those of utter non-comprehension; not that they were incomprehensible, but Luciene and Veralith had existed so in-the-moment as to fail to recognize what the other had done. On Luciene’s part, she did not immediately see that Veralith had teleported the two of them back to Apotheosis, and at that, atop the dais in Veralith’s solitary room where their battle had begun. Upon that dais was transfixed a ritualistic circle that, for the time being, Luciene never knew was there.

  Veralith, meanwhile, could not comprehend the fact that Luciene’s blade had stopped in its tracks. Veralith had done nothing to make that happen, which meant it must have been the Angel’s doing. But why? Had Veralith not pushed her far enough? After the blinding excitement had passed and allowed Veralith to see clearly again, her manic grin faded away. “What’s wrong?” she prodded at the Angel, peaking out from behind the cover of revving chain-teeth. “Don’t have it in you?”

  “I very much want to,” Luciene hissed in reply, and the Angel’s grasp on her Eviscerator began to shake in terrible, but restrained, fury.

  “And yet…” Veralith paused, then sighed, stood up, and straightened her posture out. Luciene’s Eviscerator still hung in front of her. “If you don’t have it in you after all I’ve done, Angel, you might just be a lost cause. What if I were to go out there,” she started, nodding toward a newly-formed exit in the room, “and burn the souls out from all your so-called friends? Not the Necron, of course—him I’d just twist into a Necrodermal toothpick. But the rest, I’ll—”

  Luciene roared, and lashed out with two lightning-fast strikes of her Eviscerator.

  The next few moments for Veralith proceeded torturously slowly.

  In the first, Veralith watched on with horror as godhood slipped through fingers she no longer owned. Four arms fell to the ground, their ends but bloody stumps. With them, a colossal amount of her psykana, for they were a metaphysical embodiment of her abilities, just as with the rest of her form. Likewise, in the same instant, Luciene unleashed a third strike upon her, and sundered her wings from her back as Veralith floundered from the first two blows she suffered.

  In the next moment, despair and grief overtook her, for she felt not of herself. Instead, her thoughts flicked to Mordefir, who she now sensed to be dead. Yet she remained alive. She saw, then, an image of the two of them together. Happy. In love, monstrous as they had made themselves. Was it a trick of trauma response, that showed her such imagery, or the games of her patron god pulling up the curtain to reveal what could have been?

  Then the pain came. It arrived all at once, and it seemed never to end. Veralith shrieked in a howl both physical and psychic, half her body on the floor at her feet while both halves strewn blood everywhere in sight. She toppled over in agony, and as she fell, the only thing her mania could make out was a golden fist racing for her faster than gravity allowed her to run from it. Luciene pounded Veralith’s skull into the ground once, then twice, cracking Noctilith at the back of her head. The third time, the cracks shattered entirely, as did Veralith’s face.

  A pause, then, for Luciene. Veralith continued to suffer interminably, but there was nothing she could do about it and time had begun to lose meaning. But recognizing that her calling was met, that her reason for existing had been realized, Luciene paused to breathe the first gasps of independent air that she ever had. Then she reached out to her sides and cried out to the heavens with a guttural battle cry that would have put even Leman Russ’s descendants to shame. She dropped her Eviscerator, letting it clatter away off the dais, and then she fell from her feet, kneeling over Veralith’s bloodied remains. “You are so obsessed with death,” Luciene panted, barely able to breathe. “Even yours. I cannot begin to understand why, but your death is crucial to your plans, isn’t it?”

  “You—you will g-give this g-galaxy…to the Night Daemon,” Veralith sputtered out. Luciene was not sure if it was a warning or a question.

  “When it tries, I will do to it what I have to you,” Luciene replied. “Although its fate, I’ll admit, I will make more final.”

  “You c-can’t. It is g-greater than us b-both. Only an ascendant s-source can s-stop it. I would have…stopped it,” Veralith said, waning.

  “In death,” Luciene surmised.

  “In death, rebirth,” she admitted. “How long…Angel…do you think you can leave me alive…before I ruin you?” she asked, and though her eyes were mottled whelps of blood and her skull had cracked, Veralith managed a grin, some teeth missing from it.

  Luciene paused, then passed a hand over Veralith’s form. Golden light descended upon her, incinerating and cauterizing her arm- and wing-wounds. Veralith shrieked again at the start, but passed out from the pain at last. Then Luciene, while clutching at a talon-wound on her side, spun off her foe, collapsing onto her back next to Veralith. “Enough. Long enough,” Luciene answered, and then passed out as well.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  When she came to, she found Veralith still unconscious next to her. The two were lying in a pool of each other’s blood, which spurred Luciene to sit up, and, after a moment, fight to stand to her feet. She looked around. For the first time in Throne-knows how long, things were quiet. Tranquil. The Blackstone Fortress had stopped shaking, Luciene heard no further shooting. The only sound, anywhere, was that of the labored breathing of herself and her defeated foe at her feet. Luciene knelt down again and scooped Veralith’s remains into her arms, then held her over one shoulder. She proved not to be very heavy, much like a bird even in that. Luciene then moved to recover her Eviscerator, which had fallen a good distance away, and in the process made sure to smudge the ritual circle with her feet. Then she left through the door Veralith had indicated earlier.

  Out into a scene of carnage. In what appeared to be a laboratory, blood splattered along the walls and across its floors. The decrepit remains of various contraptions were strewn about, and a beheaded, puss-ridden corpse laid in the center of the room. Yet none of this bothered her, for she was more invested in the allies that surrounded her. Zet, it seemed, was trying to break into Veralith’s room for some time, and everyone had surrounded him to back him up. When Luciene emerged, no one knew what to say at first, relief overtaking everyone.

  Then, Zha. “Is she—?” the Inquisitor asked of Veralith’s fate.

  “Alive,” Luciene nodded, and then collapsed, falling to one knee. Her closest allies fell with her, trying to support their Angel. “She must remain alive. Forever.”

  “Why?” Zet asked.

  “Because,” Luciene said, panting, then shook her head. “If she dies, so does everything in existence. She is our burden to bear.”

  “There are…prisons for entities like her, in the Imperium,” Bliss offered.

  “You are welcome to her,” Luciene shrugged, and dropped Veralith’s still-unconscious body to the ground. Though she was not physically heavy, it still felt like a great weight had fallen from her shoulders; one she was happy to be rid of.

  Myr, then, put a hand on one of Luciene’s shoulders, and the Angel looked to her and nodded. “You know?” Myr asked.

  “I knew before it happened,” Luciene answered, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I saw his destiny in these forsaken halls. And I knew I could not steer him from it, though the loss of his life is in my hands. As are those lost on Eutophoria.”

  “Ishmael chose you, Luciene, not the other way around,” Myr reminded her.

  Luciene shrugged. “Be that as it may, my existence has gotten people killed. I do not know what to do with that.”

  “Make it worth it,” Zha answered, and the Angel looked up into her dark eyes.

  After a moment, she nodded. “I shall strive to,” Luciene agreed. “Ishmael…Zaer. Thousands on Eutophoria, billions on Shanolok and across the stars. So much pain,” she sighed, and looked down at Veralith’s motionless body. “All of it her doing. That, at last, is finally over.” Then Luciene picked Veralith up again and weakly rose to her feet. “But we’re not yet finished here.”

  “We’re not?” Kor’Kassan asked.

  Luciene’s eyes were locked with Zha’s. The Inquisitor nodded and sighed. “No. We’re not. Back the way we came.”

  Luciene looked up from Zha, then, and spied a lone woman in a pilot’s bodyglove standing some distance away, back to the group. She saw the infinite horror that radiated around her, but had not yet breached beneath her flesh or infiltrated the depths of her mind. No, the day was not yet won. One apocalypse had been averted at terrible costs, but another, far greater threat remained, closer than ever.

  And this one Luciene did not think she could stop, much as she would try to.

  Their group did not have to go far to find things amiss. Less than a third of the way through retracing their steps in the Noctilith fortress, the group opened a portcullis and, for at least Kor’Kassan and Zha, nearly plummeted to their deaths. They were stopped and saved by their allies, but an entire wing of the Blackstone Fortress had been shorn off, visible tens of miles below on the shattered surface of Apotheosis.

  Many expletives were thrown out, but among them, Zha kept her cool. She reached for her vox, and ordered extraction teams to retrieve their groups. Luciene, meanwhile, scanned the horizon. Then she handed Veralith off to the Imperials—Bliss—and said, “Don’t race to follow me, Zet. Arrive with the others.”

  Before anyone could object, she then fell forward, off the debris-ridden edge of the Blackstone Fortress, and unfurled still-bloodied wings. She swooped down, then up, and then flattened her flight into a smooth glide, swinging over the devastation below. Her flight path was straight and direct. She knew precisely where to go.

  Her journey carried her far enough away that the Blackstone Fortress, while still visible, could have hidden behind a coin in one’s hands on the horizon. Apotheosis’s sun, too, hid behind the Fortress, casting a wide and ominous shadow over the world. Luciene flew on, until she passed over a titanic crimson corpse that had been impaled on countless stalagmites of debris. Twin chainaxes had fallen from its clutches and landed ahead of the creature, each the size of Luciene herself. A short distance away, a lone man sat propped up against further wreckage, his single biological hand clutching at a gut wound.

  Luciene landed next to me. “Is it done?” I asked, unable to find the strength to look up at her. It was good, then, that she took a seat next to me, her wings folding out of view behind her back.

  “It is,” Luciene nodded.

  “You’ve seen better days,” I said, trying to smile.

  “I could say the same of you.”

  “Oh, this?” I laughed. It hurt to laugh. “This is par for the course, really.”

  “The daemon?”

  “Down but not out,” I answered. “Big red here put up more of a fight than Cronos anticipated. And what about…whatever it was you fought that did all that to you?”

  Luciene paused, sighed, and leaned back against the wreckage I had been calling home lately. “Apocalyptic plans thwarted, but alive. She must remain alive. Dying is the last part of her plans.”

  “You know,” I began, then fell into a fit of coughing. Some blood left my lips in the process. “I could say the same. I…I hope to see them, though, first.”

  “They’re on their way,” Luciene assured me. I nodded. A pause arose between us, which continued until Luciene saw fit to remind me of the most painful aspect of our relationship: “I’m not her, you know.” I found myself unable to look at her, and not due to any bodily shortcoming. But I did manage another nod. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, now and forever.”

  I fought to turn my head her way, then, but before I managed it one of her hands had reached over mine, while her other hand took up the duty of pressing against my wound. I felt the pain vanish from it, and soon thereafter, she moved that arm over my shoulders, pulling me against her torso in an awkward, weak hug. She did not let go of my hand. “What is death like, Luciene?” I asked, voice a whisper.

  She didn't answer immediately, deciding between a comforting response and an honest one. She chose honesty: “Cold.”

  “Then it is good you are so warm,” I replied, and for the first time since The Finality, felt like I was breathing again.

  I hear the growling approach of Aquila Landers long before I see them.

  I suppose that answers Sigird senior’s question.