From the desiccated corpses of the young couple, he looted clothes and Relics. He was not proud of this, for it made him a thief, just like the man he hated most in the world, but necessity demanded it. He could not walk into crowded towns looking as he did, like some dead thing dredged from a shipwreck.

  From the boy, he took a stylish black doublet, which well hid the unnaturally appendages on his back. Even withdrawn into the folds of his shoulder blades, they protruded slightly, like the stubs of shorn wings.

  He also took a pair of leather britches off the boy. The shoes did not fit him, so he would have to walk barefoot. Still, he looked less out of place than before, could almost pass for an ordinary citizen, save, of course, for the insanity in his eyes.

  The woman had clearly belonged to some wealthy family despite her rustic looks. She carried a purse on her containing fifty Relics, enough to get him halfway across Aurelia, maybe even farther. He wondered briefly what she had thought to spend her coins on: a pretty dress, a ring, or perhaps on the baked goods of some choice House. Iliyet had always possessed a sweet tooth—enough sweetness for them both, they had joked—particularly for cinnamon buns. He remembered kissing her and still tasting the cinnamon on her tongue. The sense of loss that struck him then was almost too much to bear, like being split apart by the cleaver of some callous titan.

  He had killed many, many people in his time. Some deaths, he regretted. There had been a theront babe, still in its mother’s arms, whose face he could not erase, no matter how hard he tried. He thought of theronts as animals. Yet, even the most ruthless farmer did not slaughter the piglet, but allowed it to attain adulthood before the stroke of their blade.

  He had always killed in the heat of battle, or at least the frenzy of dispute—never like this. Never to satisfy an urge. The lovers had been unarmed and unaware, equally as helpless as that theront babe. He remembered, then, the closing lines of The Book of Beltanus:

  “Be fearful, mortal, lest in your quest

  to conquer this unruly wilderness.

  You become all you hate, all you fight.

  For that which we oppose, must leave its mark…”

  Was this what was happening to him? Was he becoming the thing he hated, had fought against his entire life?

  These are the thoughts of weakness, the Daimon within him said. The thoughts you must transcend.

  You are not human, any longer. Humans are food; you must eat.

  The hunger had been sated for now, but he could also feel it was not far away. Like a ghost, it hovered in the dark periphery of his awareness; he could not ignore it, even though it had been temporarily banished.

  He set off toward the woods. He had always been strong and hale, but now he was a beast that never tired. Trees and blackness swallowed him, making him one with night. He covered ground at pace, leaping over fallen trunks, clambering up rocky slopes with the agility of a monkey. His senses were painfully sharp, scouring the land ahead of him like a team of faithful scouts, reporting back to him the lay of the land, the hidden creatures, the layers of time and memory embedded in the rich smells. He could smell Daimonic remains everywhere, bones growing beneath the earth. Many brothers and sisters will rise here, the Daimon whispered. When the stars are right.

  Onward, he leapt and ran. The stars above seemed to run with him. The great Golden Wolves of the forest fled, knowing he would be no prey they could catch. He knew that if he had possessed this strength back in the Forest of Yestermere, Telos would never have escaped him. And things would have been quite, quite different.

  Telos. Telos. The name rang in his ears. At first, he thought it was his own obsessive mind clinging to the past, unable to let go, even though the thief was surely dead. But then he realised the voice was not his own, but one of the many Daimons with whom his mind was now interwoven like some grand Qi’shathian carpet, spread upon the floor of a palace of imagination, an image representing the destiny of Daimonkind of which he was now the central weave.

  And then he froze, struck blind by a sudden flood of knowing. He felt his fellow Daimon, high, high in the sky. He saw through his eyes and felt through his senses: the ship, the god-made monstrosity of technology. And he felt something else, the touch of a mind, like a paintbrush on the back of his neck, tinglingly subtle but undeniably there. The mind was at once familiar and changed.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Dizzy, he almost fell, gripping a tree to stay his fall. Images flooded his mind, accompanied by seismic feelings. And within these waves of emotion were treasures of insight, knowledge without words.

  “Telos lives!” he choked. He could have spat the words, screamed to the heavens, but he was breathless from the continual tides of information burying his consciousness. He was not acclimated yet to this state of integration. He had not had millennia, as the other Daimons had, to learn how to control this ebb and flow.

  One of the Daimons communicates with him now. I have to warn them of his tricks, to tell them…

  But the voice of the Daimon within him cut across.

  Speak not. Do not interrupt their communion. Plans are in motion beyond your reach.

  The Daimoniac gritted his teeth, then roared in the canopy of the forest like a frenzied bear. How dare they dismiss him. How dare they cast him aside and converse with his enemy.

  He reached out, through the mind-link, seeking out the other Daimon. If he is connected to Telos, and I am connected to him, then I might reach Telos. I might enter his mind. I might—

  And then he knew pain. Rippling, ataxic, unimaginable pain. The last vestiges of his strength fled him and he fell, foaming from the mouth. It was as though his skull had been split open and his brain ripped from its moorings.

  You would dare defy my commands? The Daimon’s voice was a thunderstorm in his cranium. You would risk all for your petty grudge?

  The Warden had to escape the pain, had to find a way out. He looked within and found, suddenly, a hollow darkness like the discarded shell of some colossal snail. Comforting, even in its morbidity. He withdrew into this internal fortress and all at once the pain ceased. But even more miraculously, he found the Daimon could not follow.

  Outside the walls of the shell, he was still dimly aware of suffering: of bodily pain, of mental anguish, of tempestuous emotions. But in here, all was dark and still and lightlessly peaceful. Where am I? He thought. He knew this was some mental construct, but the sheer reality and vividness of it baffled him.

  Collapsing against a wall of smooth keratin, he turned over what the Daimon had said. Petty? How little you know, how little you understand for all your age, your minds, your power.

  That Telos still lived frightened him, and what was more, the fleeting second-hand brush Telos’s mind and spirit had given him the impression the thief had somehow grown stronger.

  How was it possible? Unless he, too, had undergone a transformation.

  The Warden felt the iron of his spirit hardening yet further, as though the atmosphere of his inner sanctum were an ice that condensed even thought into hellish solidity. I must speak no further word of my vendetta, he thought. But I know what must be done. The Nergal was secondary. The gods, even, were secondary. All that mattered was destroying Telos so that once more the order of the cosmos was righteous.

  He left the shell with a mere thought, emerging again into the combined consciousness of Daimonic existence. The pain was leaving his body. The connection with Telos’s mind had been severed, and the Daimon was now descending from the ship, plummeting rapidly towards the Winedark Sea. Some plan or game was afoot, but the Daimons were shielding its full extent from him. They thought him a pawn. Well, he too could play that game.

  Where did you go? The Daimon asked, and the Warden thought he detected a note of concern there. Perhaps he, alone, being part-man, could withhold himself from the communal mind.

  It is no concern of yours, he answered. I will resume my mission. Telos is yours.

  He felt the entity relax, as though a python coiled around his spinal column had generously eased its constriction. He picked himself up off the ground and continued through the night-clad forest. Soon, he saw the lights of a village, though he had smelled and sensed it long before it became visible. The tiny fires of the dying hearths glimmered through the pines like the lights of some fairy kingdom, the province of childhood dreams. He had left such dreams behind long ago. There was only darkness now. But he had made the darkness his home.

  As he left the shadow of the trees, he saw something even more promising. Beside a building made of painted wooden platforms raised about five feet off the ground, a colossal iron caterpillar lay upon metal tracks, smoke and steam billowing from its head. An Engine! He had heard much about the ingenuity of the Engine, and the Aurelian’s love of such technology, and often he had dismissed it as worthless idolatry. But he could not deny the Engine was an impressive sight. Twelve iron-wrought segments each stood one-and-a-half times his height, and longer than three wagons laid end-to-end. Its nose—where the Engine itself was kept—was adorned with ornate metal sculptures of Lileth and her attendants, streaming through some cosmic firmament, bearing flaming braziers in their petite hands. The Engine was lit along its length by blood-fed lamps. The whole thing reeked of oil, earth, darkness, and grease. This is a Night Engine, likely the last Engine to leave the station. A stroke of fortune. And fortune, it seemed, had developed a sense of humour.

  The name emblazoned on the side of the Engine was Lightbearer.