Night had fallen clumsily over the day and smothered out the little light left in the world. Ethan had scraped together enough dry wood from the surroundings to light and feed a rudimentary fire about which he and Duke sat. The larger man had a blanket laid out in front of him—an almost infeasibly large plaid monstrosity—beneath which he fiddled with irregular shapes, humming tunelessly above the clicks and chitters of crystal and odd knitting-needle noises.

Duke's eyes were lightly closed. Gold light filtered through the thin skin, illuminating the shape of the skull in his head, his eyeballs opaque and floating like eggs in boiling water in their sockets. Ethan was doing a very good job of pretending it didn't bother him. Duke's teeth hung in a Cheshire Cat smile behind his closed lips.

Slowly, something began to unfurl itself beneath the cover, with a sound like shattering glass; first it swelled in to the contours of a stick-figure, then into the shape of a man, where it stopped growing and seemed to stir.

With a sort of repulsed curiosity, Ethan wondered which of the Lords was being extracted from death's sinuous clutches. Too small to be Dimitrescu, so maybe it was Beneviento? No, the shoulders were too broad, the shapes of it all wrong to be the petite puppet master. Heisenberg, then?

Another crackle bubbled up from under the sheet. The figure buckled, convulsed, spasmed so that its limbs rattled against the ground like branches against one another in a storm, then began to bulge and swell against all direction and reason, like a time-lapse taken of decay billowing out from something still dead.

But this was not a dead thing; trembling as though it were cold, the body opened its mouth—Ethan could see the depression in the fabric where it's increasingly misshapen head lay—and it wailed, a deep, echoing noise that belonged to the darkest depths of the sea.

Ethan looked away.

-X-

The first time Mother Miranda saw success with one of her experiments, it was success of the worst kind. It was barely worth the name.

The thing on the table before her twitched and moaned, and Miranda watched it struggle with excellent apathy a thin mask over disdain, the dark wells of her eyes cool and hollow. Lying there, like so many had before it, was something that had once been a man but had in the last few hours undergone such immense transformation that it was no longer recognisable as anything even close to human. Under the searing light of the clinic, the form taking place was simultaneously a nightmarish impossibility and yet rendered absolutely factual and unsurprising by the glaring blue-white of its surroundings. Of course it was a monster, said the sensible, sterile lights, why should it not be? What else could it be? Miranda's thoughts rippled with an angry image of her daughter, before the notion was gently detached.

This was not her daughter. This could never be her daughter. Even if it survived—something she had, at the time, only the vaguest hope for—nothing would come from its life. It was impossible that something so putrified, so incredibly warped could ever be of use as anything more than a novelty. At its prime, it existed as proof that she could create something living.

Just barely...

Nothing stirred in the halls surrounding the clinic, and indeed, there was nothing but the wind in the rushes for miles around. The breeze, bare of bone and skin, was the only thing that could pass through the mountains unscathed. All life had withdrawn from the clutching, hungry hands of the witch's experiments and huddled in their grey houses, clustered together in the valley like crystals in a vein of rock. Distance was a cardboard shield, an illusionary comfort, and yet they held it up, her name emblazoned on it in desperate, devoted gold.

There was irony in her duality—both patron saint and demon—which she might have found amusing if it weren't for how tediously difficult it made obtaining 'patients'. The hillsides were littered with the detritus of her failures like scarecrows, sending pale-faced villagers scattering like spooked doves. 'Mother Miranda' was tantamount to a god; her religion came complete with its own demons.

This one had come to her willingly. She had hoped it would make some difference.

Something in the body gave a fibrous crackle and it arched up off the examination table, the restraints snapping tight. Bulges swelled along its back, tearing the skin in miserable ribbons as the flesh beneath abused its elasticity, surging upwards in sick waves before waning again and lying tense so close to the bone the creature appeared a mere skeleton. Lesions gaped in its sides but, though chunks of muscle and splintering bone would periodically force their way through, there was very little blood. This, Miranda supposed, was fortunate; if it had bled as much as anticipated, it likely would have exsanguinated within that first hour. What little blood it produced was treacle-thick and almost black.

He had not been definitively handsome, nor especially ugly, but possessed an underwhelming, forgettable sort of face that was, in Miranda's estimation, woefully ill-befitting of his illustrious heritage. But a face—any face—would be better than this abomination of meat, where the eyes shrank and swelled in their sockets, dark red and textured like peeled fruits, and the throat, veined with squirming tentacles from the Cadou worming inside its host, forced itself from the mouth and nose before retracting into the dank comforts of it's lair like a scarlet maggot.

The witch felt her lip curl against her prompting. Mother Miranda was a creature of extreme dispassion and had been for what seemed to her to be all of time. Her loss had a vampiric quality, leeching from her all softer emotion, all gentler concern drowned under the sheer weight of tears until she was empty and cold, an ocean's worth of frigid nothing. Sometimes she would run her fingers over the glassy surface of her mind and wonder what had become of her mislaid humanity, but those concerns were few and trite. Even her longing for her daughter—so endless, so imperative, the drive behind everything she did—seemed so very far away.

And yet, this latest experiment had succeed in rousing some feeling from her. Disgust.

Such was the shocking quality of her revulsion, Miranda felt almost compelled to leave. But every process must be meticulously noted, every alteration documented, every result dutifully recorded. So, there she stood, staring into the deepening abscesses puncturing the oozing monolith with an absolute focus, as though those widening wounds contained universes. The secret to her daughter's life lay in this creature's corruption—she would prevail.

Miranda stared into the rancid holes and, as the evening wore on, they began to stare back.

-X-

Centuries before there was the mutamycete, there was The Duke.

Before Mother Miranda, before the village, before any of it, The Duke had wandered across the globe, collecting up trinkets and treasures like a magpie ornamenting its nest. Ethan was not the first in all that time to ask him what he was, and it was a constant source of indulgent frustration on his part that he could never find an answer. Or at least, find an answer that was suitably descriptive without horrifying whoever had asked.

Because there was a second question, lurking just beneath the facade of 'what are you?', a question infinitely more fearful—are you a monster?

He'd long since learnt that the correct way to answer that question wasn't 'yes'.

What was a monster? Was it claws and teeth, terrible actions, or was it something more intrinsic? Was monstrosity something you picked up, like a rock gathering moss, day by day, until it was completely covered, or was it a direction written there on the soul from the first moment?

Or was it, perhaps, the other way around; was the world filled with monsters who had, through exposure, learnt humanity the way they learnt to write—falteringly but with the diligence of necessity.

Duke was not the only creature of his ilk—far from it; there were hundreds of others, all of them rather contemptuous of his meddling, and so it was exceedingly rare that he encounter one of his own. All the little victories he offered humanity—minimal and personal as they were—were enough interference that the celestial tapestry they weaved was warped in his corner, bright threads existing where they should have winked out long since. As he often told people, he was a traveller of life, just as the mortals were—he just had the advantage of a better view of the road, and he had issues of getting attached to the frail lives he met along the way.

Ethan was just the latest. How could he not be enraptured with the tale of a father on an epic crusade to rescue his child? And from the first moment he had met him, when he had first looked at Ethan's pained, suspicious face and peeled back the covers masking his future and seen death and disaster, he had thrown himself into mitigating that, into being a guiding hand steering him from the worst of the village's avoidable adversity. Death, as it ever was, was inevitable, but Ethan went to the grave with every aid Duke had the power to offer him.

Then had come reviving him. Duke cast his eyes once more into the future and, much to his chagrin, saw Ethan waging war with the world once more.

It wasn't the outcome he would gave wanted for such a devoted man, but Duke was determined to follow. And, if he could, fix a few loose ends while he was at it.

Lord Moreau reformed in pustules, bubbling out of the crystal in all his tumorous glory, thin webs of skin stretched across the exposed bulges on his back, the globular eyes puncturing in between the masses blinking in what appeared to be confusion. Already, the broad, rubbery stretch of his mouth was trying to form a word: 'mmmmmm...mmmmaaaa...'

Duke never knew whether he should be amused or alarmed by the fact that a woman had taken a mutagen capable of reconstructing the world and forced it to create abominations who's core principles demanded a family. Soothingly, he patted one of the less damaged patches on the mutant's shoulder.

What was he? A centuries old curator of deliberately ambiguous origin, a purveyor of disaster and misfortune, the pawn that emerged unseen and slyly took the queen. He was a creature of catastrophe whose every effort ensured that something good came of his action.

What were the Four Lords? There was no denying or obfuscating that they were monsters, but Duke doubted that was all they amounted to, that there was no other channel for their thoughts and ambitions to flow down than the one dug out for them by Miranda.

The difficulty would be in encouraging Ethan to believe.

But that was fine—you didn't live for centuries without learning to appreciate the merits of a challenge.

-X-

Two people faced each other in cool, chemical darkness, one seated in a wheelchair, the other standing and regal. Surrounding them were sheafs of paper, and glass jars, and dozens of writhing things.

"Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor. I have conducted extensive trials with the mutamycete, but it is always interesting to hear a...second opinion."

"I should thank you for the experience; this is fascinating. I've never seen anything like it. It's incredible..." There was awe in his voice, a note that bordered on the same reverence that had consumed the village in his absence.

"Would you be interested in taking a more active role, doctor?"

"What did you have in mind?"

Hope was Miranda's currency; in return for a little faith, she could offer the world.

-X-

"Lord Moreau? Try to remain calm. It may not feel like it, but this is actually an improvement."

Moreau? Yes. That's right. That was him. Salvatore Moreau.

"Mmmmmmmm-mmmotherrrr?"

"Afraid not, old boy." But they were wrong—had to be wrong—because there was something very powerful sat very close by, and what could it be but Mother? Yes, they were wrong, perhaps even lying, but that hardly mattered. Mother was there; she had come, just like he'd begged her to.

The last thing he remembered was a hideous pressure as his insides swelled up beyond his skin's capacity, the blaze of corrosive bile spilling from its ducts and settling in to his porous, spongy flesh, meat and acid packed in together in overstretched elastic. Nothing had stopped his body from slipping outside of his control, and it just kept doing things, until...

Did something happen? Why did this feel like the first time he had ever woken up, feel like a memory of waking up, all ruined and ragged?

Salvatore struggled to wet his lips, looked for the owner of the voice he had been speaking to and found an under-water-shaped face, all blurry and slippery and...he knew that face! It belonged to the merchant who would appear and disappear from a room adjoining the reservoir control room, without so much as a by-your-leave to the Lord of the lake, and would always have cheese and films for him at a discount.

Relief stole over the Lord. If the merchant was here, things couldn't be so dreadful. With weak and wandering hands, Moreau felt out the world around him; the ground was firm and crumbly and faintly warm, so very unlike the familiar wood and sludge of the lake and its surroundings. The Duke's warm flesh twitched away from his shaky investigation with an affronted noise of complaint. There was nothing else nearby. Moreau's damp mind turned in circles, not sure what to make of this.

Cautiously, Moreau reached through himself and into the part of the Cadou that had intangible tentacles wrapped around the mutamycete and all its creations, his siblings and beloved Mother being the closest of these. There was the sunspot of power that could only be Mother Miranda, but the little leads that should have led to his sisters and little brother were dark, trailing down, down, down in to grave-like pits. Salvatore trailed his thoughts along the vestigial threads until the cold puddled around them froze his mind, until it hurt to follow them, until he lost his way in the pitch.

Fear settled slickly alongside his misshapen, slime-ridden heart.

"Where are t-the...the others? W-where a-are...are m-my siblings?" He hadn't lost them, had he? He was the oldest, but they were so much stronger, so much better, he never had to worry for them. He couldn't have lost them.

No. No, that wasn't possible. They were just hiding. Some cruel new trick to play on him—he'd snap at them for it when he had reassured himself that they were alright.

"I'm getting to them," the merchant—what was his name? Moreau knew he had been told—reassured him with a kindly sort of patience. "Just..sit there and try not to move. Or speak."

He could do that. He could be good.

-X-

He couldn't remember his name.

The world was slippery and infirm, and trying to understand it was like trying to stitch the delicate lace of ocean foam into a dress. Light and sound were blood-wet and painful, and they carried him in the firm grip of their currents to strange and distant shores where what little sense remained in his was razed raw by hot sand and his bones were filled with shards of coral. There he drifted, the seas evaporating around them, reduced to nothing by the enduring torridity.

He wanted to know if it worked. What 'it' was, he didn't know, but it's existence both frightened and elated him.

Awareness of his body had almost left him. What remained was a vast and shadowy vagary that his consciousness swam through without real understanding. Patches of it felt somehow thicker, like the difference between fine cobwebs and air, and whenever he passed them he regained some temporary comprehension, shades of feeling. It was as though he were dead and passing through something alive; feeling was temporal and distinctly not his.

Nothing...hurt. At least, he didn't think anything hurt. But his skin felt strangely...wet, almost as though it were not skin at all but sodden tissue, something fragile. Breathing might tear it. Pressure—what might have been touch, or something as incidental as the ground beneath his feet—registered as a chill against the damp.

And there was something shifting inside him. He would bump in to it, two strangers in a dark room, and electricity would seize him, inexplicable violence rocking his phantasmagorical frame in paroxysms that shook his thoughts apart until he went where he could no longer feel the other presence. Only then did the tremors subside, but it was still there, somewhere inside him.

What had happened to him?

In all of that, the one constant was the lack of a name. He had no name; it would have been enough to inspire tears if he had any left.

Finally, his mind made its way back to the region of his head, where some grey light filtered through, casting a thin film over his mind that did more to obscure than illuminate, just as a sunbeam catches on dust and stops glowing. There were thoughts swarming here, clouds of translucent butterflies flitting witlessly about, striking each other, sticking together, melding and coming apart again, utterly senseless.

Opening his eyes was monumental, the absolute extremes of exertion, and, once achieved, seemed an utterly fruitless endeavour; the world outside his head was nonsense, streaks of colour and nebulous shape, all of it wild and unwieldy. Everything was tears-streaked but burningly dry.

Maybe he had been crying. Maybe that was where the ocean had come from, and now it was calcifying down in to salt-structures of agony.

Surely the world had not always looked like this? So dull, so grey, so...so endlessly massive? No, there had not been this much of the world last he'd been in it. Now that he had opened his eyes, it all seemed too much to fit in his skull—it was going to tear him apart. Before, there had only been what lay directly before his face. Now, everything poured in from a dozen different directions, at angles impossible for him to understand, light piercing into sensitive receptors he hadn't known he had and searing into everything he hadn't been aware of before.

Everything was incomprehensible, everything was unknown. Everything was pain. He was pain.

Would it stop if he died? At one point, he could imagine his head, this vast tomb, as being full of a man's idle musing on the nature of such mortal frailties as death. But now that he lay at its threshold, scraped raw and empty of all his well-learned presumptions, he found he could not reach for one, nor begin to want to. Whatever he was now was new. Whatever he was now could not be bound by the structures of a Man's death.

Something surged suddenly through the grey, something gorgeous and gold, and if his lungs hadn't been long shattered, icy shards in his chest, he might have gasped. It had potential to become a face, if he could just focus properly. Scintillations danced along the sharp edges of its face, firefly speckles that bit at the dullness until it sharpened into thoughts, and all the chatoyance of the innumerable stars had been woven into a gleaming corona about its head.

The stranger in him stirred.

This...whatever stood before him was akin to a god, parting a veil of cloud to loom over pitiful humanity, Man, in all His failures, laid out bare to be blessed by the presence of this superlative mysticism. All the visceral agony, all the oppressive clouding in his mind, the process of becoming a stranger in his own skin...it was all forgivable—forgettable, even—in the face of this gilded presence.

He knew her. He knew her as a plant knows the sun—a deific benefactor, forever above, and the world without her was dark and cold.

Darkness gaped at the centre of the haze, and a liquid melody poured out. It was kind, but firm, and ever so slightly sharp, like the broken edge of a boiled sweet.

"Doctor Moreau? Can you hear me? Are you...are you awake?"

Moreau? Was that...was that supposed to be him? It felt familiar, as though he had come across a handprint in an ancient chamber and found his own matched perfectly.

"Wwwww...w-whhhhhh." Words wouldn't come, only sounds, and they hadn't even the dignity of being sounds he recognised. The voice was wet, half-drowned, gurgling low in his chest, bubbling out from between his ribs like mould-water before ever reaching his throat. His god sat before him, coldly curious, until, finally, the warbling resolved itself into something that came close to what he wanted. "Wwwwwwwhhhhhhooooooo...?"

Something tore, something fleshy, and he was drowning in metal. The thing above him smiled.

"I am Mother Miranda. You agreed to undergo a surgical procedure for me, and I am happy to tell you it has been...successful." There was the slightest hesitation in that glass-smooth voice, rousing apprehension in him, like a careless finger stroking over the velvet of his security and ruffling it. Some of this must have shown in his expression, for the figure leant further over him and spoke again in slightly louder tones. "You're safe with me. Get some rest."

With that she melted out of existence, leaving Moreau alone with the blank, white expanse of what could have been a ceiling or a sky. The thing inside him tensed miserably.

Left alone—as alone as he could be—Moreau tried to piece himself together. Every scrap revolved around 'Mother'. The glittering rays of that idea cast all doubt, all fear, all pains in to deep, penumbrous shadows, dark enough to be non-existent.

'Mother' was a promise, bright and shiny like a lure, and already those sentimental fishhooks were digging at something exposed and vulnerable. The topography of Moreau's mind was changing, and that word would be the foundation over which all else took place, shaping the boarders of his thoughts for the rest of his unfortunate existence.

Mother.

Mother.

Mother.

-X-

Moreau was back, dripping, and seeping, and awful, the smell of leaf-mould and grey skies permeating the air around him. Every so often he would reach out to tug at Duke's sleeve and ask if he was doing a good job at being quiet.

Even with only one of the Lords back, Ethan could feel his hackles rising, every nerve twanging like a wire coil with painful pangs of enmity. Moreau had yet to notice him—had yet to really acknowledge an awareness of the world beyond the few feet of ground immediately in front of him—but lack of notice did nothing to ease the rampant paranoia that came with sitting so close to something that had tried so ardently to kill him mere hours ago. Placidity did nothing to detract from the fact that the fish-creature was dangerous.

Mulishly, Ethan threw another log onto the guttering fire, sending a fizz of gold specks spiralling waspishly outwards. Briefly, the red light surrounding them flared and Moreau jerked up, looking dazedly about with pale, fish-eyes, and Ethan recoiled under their confused gaze.

Myopic as they were, it was implausible to think Moreau could actually see, but there was an alertness there, a startled watchfulness that whispered to some animal part of the brain that he was watching shimmers coruscate over the surface of your soul as he had once watched the light play over the waters of his home.

For too long a moment, Moreau stared directly at the man who had killed him, lips parted as though about to ask a question. Then he hung his monstrous head, returning to whatever wet, wandering thoughts he entertained in its grimy halls, muttering disconsolately to himself and fiddling his clawed hands in his lap. Ethan swallowed bile.

Beneath the blanket, something new stirred, growing into the shape of a woman; even under the sheet, the voluptuous curves of her body were obvious, making it quite clear that what was being revived was not the slender, little doll-maker, but something for more powerful. Ethan's lips thinned. He didn't have a least favourite Lord, one who's qualities were more offensive to him than the others, but Dimitrescu had the dubious honour of being the first, the true re-entry to his nightmare. It was standing atop the castle wall, with the Lady a hurricane whirl all around him, that it really registered to him that the three years had been but a temporary respite, that sanctuary would be forever impermanent. For that, he hated her. Hers was the face that first came to mind when he riffled through his contempt of the village's feudal governors.

Just as with Moreau, the figure retained its human shape for a lazy stretch of a moment, before convulsions shook it, began to change it, the body lengthening and strengthening.

Dimitrescu's dark-curled head protruded from the covering, face scrunched in pain, sharp teeth bared in an agonised grimace. As she grew, the pale skin of her face split apart, as did the skin on her neck, chest and shoulders, leaving widening, incarnadine seas of twitching muscle lanced through with bulging, dark-blooded veins. Ethan could see fresh skin growing outwards from the torn patches, at a rate just a little slower than the growth of the rest of her; she was a jigsaw puzzle, forever coming together and being pulled apart. It might have been pretty if she weren't something alive.

By the light of the fire, Ethan watched Moreau brighten and reach for the giantess, who clutched shudderingly at his offered hand. Dimitrescu's slate grey eyes darted about in fright and incomprehension, glancing about like a wet scrap of newspaper in a storm, catching on things for only a trembling moment before being ripped away by an irrefusable force. Her enormous frame lurched upwards without any apparent intention, rivulets of blood drawing a vivisectionists diagram over pale skin that was coral red under firelight's eye, the hand holding on to Moreau brutally white-knuckled.

Whatever Ethan was, it was too much for his skin. His lungs were pressed sliver-flat within his chest by the incessant swelling of some nameless emotion. This stricken woman could not be the sternly regal murderess he had faced only that morning...

The wavering lance of Dimitrescu's eyes fell upon Ethan. She stopped shaking. Her face became filled with relief and a piteous hope.

"Mama?" Her husky voice was choked, too small for the rest of her.

Something cold and sharp pierced through the skin of Ethan's throat and lay flat upon his tongue.

"I'm not your fucking mother."

Dimitrescu inhaled sharply, a sobbing note like a sleepwalker waking. She didn't look as though she understood—her expression was consumed with a tremulous, girlish bewilderment and betrayal that didn't suit her leonine features and that Ethan felt perversely guilty for.

Wordless, Ethan threw himself to his feet. The flickery orange light of the campfire lost interest in him after a few feet's worth of distance. The black land opened like a flower before him.

He needed a drink. A walk would have to do.

-X-

Salvatore's reconfigured form took some time to adjust to, and so he remained in the clinic in the mountains as the world outside tentatively unfurled from its fear of the witch and her trials; her preoccupation with her monster spared the villagers all the little cruelties of her attentions and so, as spring rolled around, and the sparse blossoms of the new year began emerging from the banks of thawing snow, so too did the populace come creeping, full of thanks to 'Mother Miranda' for delivering them safely from winter's grip. Through sterile corridors and rooms thick with bleach fumes, Moreau relearnt how to walk, stumbling on thin, weak legs, a trail of inexplicable wetness on everything he touched. Cohesion came and went in surges like the tides, with seashell scraps of understanding remaining beached each time.

He knew his name. He knew where he had come from, what he had allowed Mother Miranda to do to him, what he had been...before. There were no mirrors in the facility—something for which he was increasingly thankful—but one of the observation rooms was fitted with a divider of smokey glass that offered him a faint impression, a wavering outline. Even this infirm silhouette made something sick and anxious curl in Moreau's chest.

What was he? What had the experiment done?

'Mother will make it better. Mother can fix me.'

She never did.

Mother Miranda fawned over him with apathetic fervour, detached but obsessive, her impersonal hands firm in their exploration of his bloated flesh and all it's hideous intricacies. Her ministrations were always kind, performed gently even when it became clear their hurting him was inevitable, but Moreau could never quite disabuse himself of a certain sense of timorous inadequacy. Surely this—a shuffling mound of dripping pieces filled with an infirm mind—wasn't what she wanted? Surely hatred lurked beneath those soft touches?

With a cloak and cowl cast over the extremes of his deformity, Moreau did not look especially monstrous, and could pass through the village without causing uproar, but a pervasive uneasiness fell upon the place like rain and would never fully dissipate. The darkness dulled the unsettling ache of his new eyes which, he had found, saw the world in a variety of colours he wasn't used to; the eyes in his face were mostly blind now, but he preferred that to the warped, warbling world experienced by the eyes on his back.

It was almost a relief when she sent him away to live in the milling district; at least there, though parted from the one thing that made it easier to breathe on bad days, he wouldn't have to look into her beatific face and wonder if his beloved mother wished he had died.

-X-

The first real awareness Alcina had of her new life was of a hand in hers. When she peeled open her eyes, all that greeted her was a colder, broader type of darkness than the one that lived behind her eyelids. If there was a world out there, she couldn't see it. Her body was humbug-striped with a rapidly cooling warmth and felt like something that had been recently stitched together by someone in a rush.

With effort, she turned her focus to the hand in hers. For a hopeful moment, she thought it might belong to one of her daughters, then the world solidified and that hope softly shattered. It was too large, and of incredible strength, such that it would have bruised her if she were still a woman. It's skin was damp, and cold, and it's nails were curved and thick.

Alcina knew that hand.

"Salvatore?" She croaked. The hand, impossibly, tightened with a promise of safety.

Little by little, her eyes adjusted. The ugly mass of her brother's face peered up at her, crooked teeth visible in an anxious, lopsided smile.

"Sister Dimitrescu," he greeted formally, petting the back of her hand, careful around the stinging strings of red that segmented it. "I'm here, Alcina."

There was something strangely nostalgic, a comforting familiarity in waking, damaged, confused, in a body she barely recognised, with Moreau at her side. He was not the most useful of her siblings, nor was he who she had wished to see, but this was how she had begun her life as Miranda's child and it seemed fitting that this be how she ended it.

"Where am I?" The air was cool, but this place smelt nothing like her blood-soaked grounds, or the reservoir, or even the ceremony ground in between. Where was she? Where were her girls? They couldn't stand the cold...

Alcina happened across a thought, read it, then pushed it violently away. Nothing could have happened to her girls—they were safe just...not here...

Where was here?

"Outside. The-the m-merchant man he's...doing...things..." Salvatore looked after a bulky shadow with an expression that always reminded Alcina that those half-blind eyes had once been sharp, a look that was always quick to founder like an academic paper soaking with water and vanishing in to a lake. Alcina stared at Duke—his eyes gold and ignorant of them both—then out to their desolate surroundings, a fear she couldn't put name to rising rapidly through her blood.

All around, the land was flat. Alcina searched the skyline for the lofty peak of her castle and found nothing. The events of the last day were storybook pages in her head, tasteless and textureless, but...they had been real.

She had lost. Her children were comatose. They had all failed Mother.

"I failed her...I can't believe it, I...I failed her." There was more awe than anything else in her at that. Failure had never even entered her mind as a possibility. What would Mother Miranda say? Gingerly, Alcina touched the string in her mind that used to mean Mother and felt, to the nauseous lurching of her soft insides and the sudden melting of her bones, it shrug into an abyss. Mother Miranda had fallen. Stupidly, her first thought was the realisation that she would never have a chance to apologise, followed by relief that Mother would not be there to scorn her and her family, like dust peppering her face before the avalanche of 'our mother is gone'.

At her side, Moreau moaned and gripped his head between blood-soaked hands, his guilty voice running a commentary parallel to her own. Up to that point, he had done a rather good job 'forgetting' his woeful defeat and all it entailed in favour of observing his sister's return. Now, his world collapsed inwards. "No, no, no, no, we...tried. It was just s-so hard. Not our fault, i-it wasn't our...our fault." The desperate optimism wavered and crumpled, and Moreau began to wail, a noise like the leaden tolling of an underwater bell. "She's go-going to h-hate us!"

Alcina sat up straighter, alarm jolting her out of her own leaden shock by the completeness of his misery—she had neither considered that Moreau would be affected nor intended for her mourning of her own shortcomings to trigger...whatever bawling episode this was. The realisation that he must have fallen too was, at that moment, less imperative than the sudden and frantic need to stop her brother's tears.

"Moreau? Moreau!" The sobbing continued, heedless.

"She-she brought u-us back! S-she can't h-h-hate us...or maybe...is t-this punishment?"

With perhaps more force than necessary, Alcina seized the man by his frail shoulders and shook. "Salvatore, be silent! Mother will not be angry, she's—" The word 'dead' sat at the back of her throat like a smooth pebble, challenging her to say it, to make it real. "—she...Mother isn't here."

"Where...where is she?" Beneath the rime of tears, the watery incomprehension that was so permanent for Moreau, deep in the well of his pupil, there was a glassy bead of Knowing, and Alcina's throat went dry. The word 'death' was a stone in her belly; she couldn't find it in her to give it to him, even if some part of him already knew. "I don't know," she said instead, hands softening in Moreau's shoulders and, to her relief, he calmed, but it was a fragile, unhappy thing.

Gold fell across the pair. Duke had opened his eyes and was watching them curiously. Alcina drew herself up to her full, impressive height, suffusing every inch of her self with the inherent superiority of her ancient blood.

"When will you be returning Mother Miranda to us?" Duke smiled a little, fondly, as though she were a child that had done something amusing.

"I won't be." All Alcina's excellent blood went ice cold. "She has what she wanted. I imagine she would be less than pleased with my removing her from her daughter so soon after finally getting her back."

"But we need her!" Shrillness was unbecoming in a lady, and yet she could be nothing else. She glanced down at Moreau, hopeful for his aid or inattentiveness, she did not know. He was muttering to himself again, damp eyes watching the darkness as though it were doing something.

"Do you?" Duke said, quite conversationally, as though he were not talking about the gutting of everything the Lords had known for a century. And, once, Alcina would have risen to such a question with the zealous wrath of a challenged doctrinaire, armed with a thousand reasons why Miranda's excellence was so necessary, each burning brighter than the stars.

Now, when she reached in righteous indignation for those rationales, she found their treasured ranks as fragile as old hymn sheets, tearing apart as she leafed through them trying to find the fervour that had once come so easily. Through the holes came Miranda's cool, clear voice saying again the words that had started the unbinding of her daughter's love.

"Too much for your daughters to handle? Well, I'm sorry dear, but I did tell you they were imperfect."

The Castle Lord felt something black and terrible surge through her chest and tore her eyes away from their duel with Duke lest he see her loyalty faltering. If the merchant noticed her turmoil, he gave no indication.

"Miranda will be fine," Duke reassured, as though Miranda's wellbeing had Alcina's concern. "Now then, I earlier took the liberty of removing a few items from your home—some of your dresses are stored in my cart, if you feel up to retrieving them. Second drawer down on the right."

"Larcener!" Too short a response, too snappish, but she sounded like herself again.

"Well, you certainly weren't using them. The need for finery is far too earthly a concern for the dead..."

With that, the Duke turned back to his odd ministrations. Alcina looked down in time to see the slender form of a young woman buckle and the features on its face, visible through the fine weave of what seemed to be silk, shrug themselves from her head leaving it blank and smooth as an egg.

Donna. Darling Donna, always such a good aunt to her girls, such a good sister.

Moreau brightened. Alcina regarded him cautiously, but the paroxysms of grief had subsided; still they lurked, beneath a thin sheen of normalcy thrown on in joyful anticipation of their sister. There would be a return to this, she knew, but not yet; she couldn't handle it yet.

"C-come here," Moreau coaxed, holding his hands out. Not understanding, Alcina cast about herself, finally looking down to where her arm was being unconsciously cradled against her chest. "Come, come. Let me look. I-I-I...I'm a doctor!"

"You're an imbecile," Alcina sulked, but proffered her forearm into her brother's outstretched hands and didn't complain about the chill of webbed, clawed fingers skating eagerly over her white skin. Muttering half-formed words to match his racing, half-formed thoughts, Moreau brought her wrist close enough to his milky eyes for his sparse lashes to tickle her pulse-point. Alcina held perfectly still, as poised as someone still walking the tightrope of death could be, her stormy eyes fixated with something distant.

Under the Duke's hands, the faceless figure sat up, flailing blindly. Unhappiness oozed from her in a pulse of silver dust.

"We're here, Donna." Without looking, Alcina reached for her sister, cupping her massive palm about the bird's-egg fragile head and feeling the smaller woman lean gratefully into it like a little cat. On wobbly legs, Donna rose up, staggered towards them, and collapsed, stringless, by their side, blind, mute, swaddled in a blanket, and half in her sister's lap. Alcina held both her siblings close, struggling with something fierce and powerful red-hot in her heart.

"I'm g-glad you're not...gone, sister." Alcina was relieved Moreau's voice was quiet and indistinct; she could pretend to have not heard him.

Long minutes passed. The sky above grew lambent with lurid stripes of violet as the smoke cleared and night surged into the gaps. With a deep crackle and a ragged scream, Heisenberg was jolted back into the world. Duke rose heavily to his feet and returned to his seat at his caravan, leaving the Four Lords relatively alone.

"Heisenberg..." She was never sure how to treat him in these in-between times where their rivalry was settled, where there was no one to impress and no goal to be fought over. On the wall behind Alcina's heart was a frieze, this macabre little family etched into the fabric of her, and no matter how hard she tried to scratch Heisenberg out, how rough his image became from her abuse, there he stayed.

The man flopped his head towards her voice. There was no expression on his face and no tone in his voice when he said: "My army...that bastard destroyed my army..."

Ah, there was that knifing annoyance. Her little brother; so obsessed...

"The man-thing destroyed more than that, you single-minded mechanist," Alcina snapped, inconsequential thoughts of softness melting away.

"Nobody cares about your draughty old castle." Alcina bit her lips until they bled. "My army took so much work..."

Silence reigned for a long moment, but it was an oddly comfortable silence to follow such open bitterness—or it would be odd, if such bitter words hadn't been so customary between them all. A little more trivial conversation passed between the four, things falling easily into the places they usually occupied, the awkward jigsaw puzzle that came crookedly together in Miranda's absences. Nobody made any further move towards mentioning Miranda, or their defeat, but each of them, at some point in the hours that followed, sent questing tentacles out into the pitted absences in the fabric of their world and shuddered.

The sky deepened from violet to bruised navy. One by one they succumbed to sleep; first Donna, then Moreau...

Heisenberg was left alone with Alcina and her tongue came unstuck.

"Heisenberg..." She whispered, "Mother Miranda is gone." Dead.

"Dead?" He blew out a long breath. "Never actually thought I'd see the day." The woman who was not really his sister pressed her bitten lips in to a thin line, somber as a statue at a wake.

She knew what would happen now. She hadn't expected it to hurt.

In thoughtful silence, Heisenberg stood and walked to Duke's caravan, retrieved his clothes and dressed. The expression of thought blossomed into a maniac smile. He turned to Alcina and, for just a second, the sheer joy on his face was like love.

"Ha!" He laughed, a bright, slightly mad, free sound. "It's...it's over! I'm done! It's over! That fucking winged bitch is gone—and now...now I can be too." Unsteady on his feet, Karl rose up and walked boldly into a darkness that covered him the way ink covers a copper coin.

Numb, she watched him go. She stared into the dark as though it hoarded all she desired and asked it what she should do.

Like Mother, it didn't answer.

-X-

In the familiar halls of his old clinic, Moreau carried out the same Cadou experiments he had seen his Mother perform a hundred times. Each one ended in dismal, disgusting failure. The ones that survived became monsters, the ones that didn't made a mess; neither was what he wanted.

Time after time he tried. Everything around him died. Little by little, the workers withdrew from the milling district, leaving the creaking windmills to their own lonely devices under inattentive, half-blind eyes.

With every death, it became clearer to Salvatore how sincerely fortunate he had been to have Mother Miranda's gift. His life may be strange and discomforting, but it was life. He was alive. He could walk.

It was not the Cadou that made such miraculous things possible—his own endless failings attested that.

Mother Miranda was a god. By her blessing, everything was possible.

-X-

Swaying alone in the dark, Heisenberg tilted his head back and looked up to where he knew there should be stars. "I'm free," he whispered, and even as he said it, even as he vanished, he sounded disbelieving of his own fortunes.