The neighbors had called the Peacekeepers on them already to no avail, not liking the fact that a bunch of imps and Hellhounds had converged on the Manse of the Proxy of Lucifer. Krieg could only barely give a sliver of a fuck about them, however. A few angry words by Blitz had sent them on their way, leaving those high-born wastes of blood to stew in their own uselessness. The reason they were here was clear and enraging, especially to Krieg. There was a rocking cradle in visible through the door to the long dining room. An empty one.

Ruut Nuckelavee had made good on her promise to claim Moxxie and Millie's firstborn.

Needless to say, the entire Miller Family had come, and they were preparing for war.

"I don't want to have to..." Blitz began, talking to Krieg's mother.

"To what? Lose me again? Blitz, I am a grown woman, and your mother besides. And I have just as much bad blood here as any of you."

"I would dare say you have a significant amount more," Krieg pointed out.

"That's not the point," Mother said. She looked to the two bereaved parents. Millie was vacillating quickly between utmost despair and explosive, frenzied rage. Moxxie, on the other hand, was consistently seething. She knew from Loona's mentions of it that Moxxie had a titanic mind, capable of spinning up to terrific speeds such that it made the world seem to come to a halt. How many paths was Moxxie imagining now, in this moment where his firstborn child was taken from him?

How many grisly torments was he inventing for the one who had taken her?

"People, the point of all this is that the Clan which has been ruin to all of us – except you two, I suppose," Krieg said, pointing briefly at the Hellhounds standing at the side of the room. Loona, at least, was a Miller. Even the Original Miller. What Maelstrom was doing here was a mystery to Krieg, "has openly declared contemptuous war against us. And if we want to win that war, we shall have to strike with such furious and unexpected intensity that we do not simply right the wrong done to the Roughs, but shatter the pillars of their strength such that they can never attempt such perfidy again!"

"Exactly!" Tilla said. "Ruut Nuckelavee has been a knife in our backs for too long already. It's time we remind her that no Family stays on top of the Clan forever."

"So the plan is just bum rush Bal Matheer and get their kid back?" Blitz asked, from where he was loading magazines with her ensorcelled bullets.

"She won't be at Bal Matheer," Tilla said. Her eldest son tilted his head in confusion at her. "Bal Matheer is too close to the highway. She'll expect that if somebody's going to attack, that they'll do it there first. No, she'd have taken Beatrice directly to Sietch Cruac."

"Which is... where again?" Loona asked, as she flipped through pages of the Grimoire Ultima Mundi.

"Ordinarily, I'd say that a Grimoire wouldn't be enough to get there, but I know what that is," Krieg said, recognizing the immense power in the Incunabula for what it was. "Mother has been to Sietch Cruac. She can help you cast the portal to take us there."

"Us? Krieg, you're..." Tilla began.

"These people tied me to a bench and forced a man to rape me," Kreig said. "Over and over. For a FUCKING YEAR. They've done as bad or worse to you. To both of you," she swept her hand to indicate both mother and son, illiciting a grumble of half-formed profanity from Blitz.

"This is our fight too," Uller said.

"And you just step in as though invited," Krieg said over her shoulder to him. But he had a darker look on his face than even she knew possible, as his fingers touched the broad scar on his brow.

"I owe you this, and Nuckelavee needs to pay for what…" he broke off, a pained look in his eye. "Just... Let me help," he said, looking very earnest as he did so.

Krieg thought a moment, but the fact was, having him would even things out quite a bit. She nodded toward Blitz, and the Envy Imp took that for the invitation it was. "Now. we..."

"This is going to be a decapitation strike," Moxxie said, his voice utterly devoid of any sort of impish feeling. Cold as Betrayal and nearly robotic, he turned hard, furious eyes at them all. "You will need to kill Ruut Nuckelavee, then ensure she can't be brought back. Millie and I are getting our daughter back."

"Killing Ruut Nuckelavee will remove the most powerful Thaumaturge of the modern day from the leadership of Clan Cruac, likely crippling them for generations to come," Krieg said with a nod. It was a proper plan.

"And while you're busy with that..." Mother said, staring into the distance as though realizing something. She turned to Loona. "I'm sorry to have to impose on you, but I need you to stay behind."

"Keep the door open for you? Fine," Loona said.

"No. It's more important than that. I need somebody who will look after my children."

"Like... for a few hours, or...?" Loona asked, glancing suspiciously at her. Then the Hellhound sighed. "You think you're not gonna come back, don't you? And you wanna make sure that they're cared for?"

"There's a chance that..." Tilla began.

"And the reason you're asking me this is because... you... intend to go on your own mission while they're dealing with the big fish," Loona was nodding. "To get back somebody else that Cruac took from you. That lover of yours, I'm guessing?"

"How did you know about Bartolomayo?" Mother asked, shock clear.

"You just told me," Loona said. She turned to Krieg. "I'm guessing you wanna kill Ruut? Take Maelstrom and Blitz. They'll get you in the room with that rancid bitch."

"Sounds like a plan!" Blitz said enthusiastically, slamming a magazine into his Convertible Rifle, which he'd had to swap the barrel of ever since the 'sex-party incident'. You couldn't fire a bullet through a barrel that took a right angle turn to the left. Maelstrom just nodded, resolute.

"That means that... Mother, you will take Uller to emancipate your beau. Do you know which Sietch he's being kept in?" Krieg asked.

"Only by name. But the Portal Crux is in Sietch Cruac. It'll have my way of reaching Sietch Kheruk," Tilla said.

"Then we've got a plan. M&M get their kid back," Blitz said, tossing Moxxie a shotgun and Millie an axe, "and me, the little shit and Maelstrom keep them off'a you and too busy with our brand of bullshit. Meanwhile, Mom and the flying shit go get muh new stepdad!"

"Upon this day, death to Cruac, death to Ruut Nuckelavee, and death to the old order!" Krieg said, holding a ritual dagger high. "What we do now may not be borne witness, but it will be spoken of by those who survive it until the end of days!"

"Let's go get us back a kid," Blitz said, with an earnest nod toward the father. The last sob to rise from Millie's throat was crushed, and she stood. No longer trapped in her grief and sorrow, she now had a target to explosively level herself against. And Moxxie would keep her safe long enough to tear the towers of Cruac down with her bare hands.

Today would be the beginning of a new history.

Chapter 26

The Birth of the Golden Bloodline

Moxxie thought he'd learned the pinnacle, the very acme of wrath during his fight against Birch. He had been wrong. That outrage, that righteousness and that murderous energy was but smoke in a gale compared to what pounded in his heart today. There weren't complicated plans. Just a direction, an objective, and two parents who were willing to depopulate a metropolis in order to get their family put back together again.

"Aaaand, now," Loona said, as the portal snapped open. Millie was through faster than a bullet, and the Four Toe imps that were endemic to the Ring of Lust didn't even have time to realize that an alarm had gone off before they were bisected, trisected, beheaded, or disemboweled. Just a blink of time, then five imps exploded into gore and body-parts, as though all struck dead in the exact same instant. Moxxie was just behind her, hearing the loud klaxon that magic blared since a portal not-of-Cruac had been opened into one of their fortress cities. He waved a hand in the vague direction the noise was coming from, and then clenched his fist. A block of strange, green-blue ice fell, silence taking the place of noise; when the ice shattered, it let out a paltry moan, the spell that warned Clan Cruac that they were about to be murdered left to rot on the ground.

In better days, Moxxie would have taken a moment to watch his wife in violent combat. How she used her entire body to swing that battle axe straight through imps as though they were made of putty. How she didn't even alter her swing when she reached an imp in ensorcelled armor, allowing the sheer fury of her strike to not even split him as crush him under its thunderous momentum. An older woman with tightly curled horns took a step back, her mouth opening and her eyes blackening as she, in a panic, called up thaumaturgies to save her.

Moxxie didn't let her get very far. Whatever that bitch wanted to do to his Millie was moot, since he reached out with his own power, and combined three Thaumaturgies into a single utterance of power. One, a portal, opened inside the woman's body, a hideously slippery prospect, since portals hated opening inside organic matter. The second, an unchanging, severing the vessels of her circulatory system. Then, a changing, which pulled the dissected mass through the portal. The other portal opened, and dropped three quarters of the woman's entire blood circulatory system at her own feet. She tried to keep casting, but her limbs went leaden, as she looked at her own twitching lungs and flopping heart, and then keeled over dead.

"Invaders! Invaders with magic!" a call came from out of Millie's easy reach. Moxxie didn't even bother with sorcery for this one. Why lean on the art of Beatrice Kellion when he could instead favor Oliver Winchester? The shotgun didn't even need pumping, since he shelled out for the semi-auto version; with a calamitous blast, it launched bullets that tore black streaks through the air as they flew, catching the young man in his back and introducing his spine to his sternum. A flick, and he aimed at the pair of older imps, a woman and man with Cruac clan tattoos on their brows who were screaming in shock and terror, and fired a shell into each of them. He had ended a family today. Fuck 'em.

He put power to his hooves, not able to keep up with Millie except by her consent. And since she was taking the time to make puree out of the last guy who had the extreme misfortune of being in her line of sight when she arrived, he had a moment to reach her side. "Come on, sweetie. Bea's waiting for us."

"Yeah..." Millie said, her eyes so bloodshot that they were nearly as black as Moxxie's were right now.

Moxxie let the shotgun announce his presence in the courtyard of the palace-temple that they'd been dumped just out side of. Each shot was aimed precisely and expertly to tear a head from a body, to knock down the would-be-snipers that were up in towers that overlooked where the married-couple was outright striding into. There was to be no subtlety today. As little subtlety as there was to be mercy, in fact. If it had black blood and wasn't already dead when either Moxxie or Millie saw it, they immediately corrected that.

The pain was still raw. It was still furious. The shame that he'd failed to protect Bea when she needed him – when she needed both of them! – the most, mere minutes after her own birth; that was a fire that ignited such bilious and ecstatic hatred in him that he felt that he could kill until the sun died in the sky and not extinguish it. And it was obvious that his own rage was mirrored, blush for blush, by his bride. Other mothers would still be recovering, barely able to walk after their first spawn. Millie raced with almost imperceptible speed between her victims. Here in the temple-palace grounds, there were more armed guards, wearing the old vestiges of the Templeguard, bearing polearms in their hands. Polearms they were woefully unprepared to use, compared to Mildred Rough.

Moxxie swished his hand to create a portal that caught a bullet that had been fired at him and vomited it back out into the person who'd fired it, and continued to reload his shotgun as Millie slammed her axe into those Templeguard so hard that even when their armor didn't outright split from the force, it was because the flesh underneath had been reduced to mush in the armor's stead. One of them, perhaps having offered a bit more care in learning the ceremonial weapon he carried, tried to hook and slash Millie. He got to die a little slower than most of the others; since she couldn't get her axe-head into him in an efficient manner, she slammed it into the marble pavers and grabbed the Templeguard by his upper and lower jaw. With a flex of her arm, she ripped his mandible off, and then ripped open his ragged throat with his own stolen teeth, before kicking him away to bleed to death over yonder. Another guard, flinching back from the brutality he'd witnessed, ended up having the mandibular bone slammed through his eye for the trouble, and then had his head stomped into a canoe by her rage-fueled hoof.

With his shotgun fed, he whispered words of power, his hand tensed above the spot in his gun where the shell currently lay, imbuing the pellets of doubly-profaned detritus that they used instead of mere and mundane lead, transforming the shot from garbage empowered by magic into something containing the unspeakable essence of the Horseman Famine. So when he fired it, past his wife and at the doors that were no doubt trying to lock the pair of them out of the palace temple, it did not launch with smoke and lead, nor even with fire, but with a ruinous stream of decay, unmaking all that was not specifically crafted by impish hands in defiance of God's Creation. While the doors were ornate and thick, and spelled to be all but adamatine, they were still steel. Steel required iron. Iron as an element was crafted by God.

What Moxxie fired at it was not even antimatter. It was unmatter. Antithetical to the very notion of matter, nullifying the concept of it. And the doors crumbled and fell before his fury.

He knew he couldn't keep that kind of carnage up. His metaphysical gas tank only had so much space for gas in it, and every time he used one of these higher Thaumaturgies that he had discovered in the Codex Cruac In Alabaster it drained a significant amount of that vital ether from him. But it would return. He was an imp, and the Abyss was only a few Rings down.

"Let's get our daughter back," Moxxie said, idly blowing apart a weeping young she-imp who was trying to shoot at him with a snub-pistol and missing horribly with the next shot in his shotgun.

Millie, perhaps too berserk in this moment to even speak, nodded, and launched herself into the building. And gamely, her husband followed after her.

"Alright little-shit, we're away from that shit on the ground level; where's the bitch?" Blitz demanded as the glass finally tinkled to stillness. The Croneguard was currently defenestrated and en route to a rude reunion with the concrete outside. Krieg began spreading her magic from the spot on the floor that she'd sent it out, seeking like the mycomycetes of a fungus through the delicate atomic structure of the building. Maelstrom, who had done the throwing, was already covered in black gore; it almost vanished against his fur, but considering he'd come here with a white shirt on, the effect was much more pronounced where it ought to be minimized.

"I'm seeking her out. Patience, Uncle!" Krieg said.

Common sense would have dictated that the three of them aid Moxxie and Millie in bull-rushing the child and killing all around them, but that 'common sense' was hampered by a lack of understanding of the traditions of Clan Cruac and Ruut Nuckelavee in particular. One would think that the one who gave the order to steal a child would be there as the child was bound to the Clan. But Krieg had spent an in retrospect rather horrifying portion of her childhood obsessed with Ruut Nuckelavee and her ways, thinking that one day she would be a party to them. And she knew full well that Ruut Nuckelavee would see no need to personally be at a ritual that she trusted her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – some of the latter were almost aged to death themselves – could do in her stead. No, Ruut was like a spider in the least flattering of ways. She saw no need whatsoever to leave the protected heart of her web.

So while Moxxie and Millie killed their way through the collected greatest Mages of the Family Nuckelavee, likely erasing two if not three entire generations of Ruut Nuckelavee's family tree in so doing, Krieg decided to take all of her righteous indignation, all of the betrayal that Morgan Nuckelavee had felt when instead of being formally taught was strapped down and used for breeding stock, all of the hate that she had gathered in her toward the Matriarch of Nuckelavee and the Clan Cruac entire, and she drove them into the domicile of Ruut Nuckelavee herself: the Tower of Grey.

The door slammed open, and another Croneguard – a thin-plated Shock Guard – stomped into the room, the magic bound around him obviating the need for such things as traditional armor or protections. The instant that both Blitz and Maelstrom saw the Shock Guard, they hurled themselves at him, and the heaviest soldier of the Clan Cruac would bring its magic-enhanced strength to bear against them, sure that magical regeneration and bolstered Resilience would see him through today.

It was a defense supposedly insurmountable by mere physical means. The kind of defense that only a Thaumaturge or another stripe of Wizard could shut down and bypass.

The Crones of Cruac had never known the deadly art of Blitz Miller, nor the lunatic strength of Maelstrom the New King of the Pits.

Krieg paid no mind to the Croneguard as his Shock Wards were outright ignored by the strongest fighting Hellhound in Hell, as the hound twisted his body was slowly, but inexorably, into a position where there was enough gap between plates of protective wards – made such that they would overlap instead of interfere, as such wards usually did – that Blitz could jam his knife into the root of the man's neck, and cause a great spray of black blood to soak both men, projected by the dying heartbeats of a magically supercharged heart.

She ignored her Uncle and the Hellhound as they hurled him out the window after the first that they'd killed in here, and she focused on the feeling of her tendrils of magic questing ever upward and downward and outward. She was not a fool. She knew that Ruut Nuckelavee was a prudent woman; she would have to be to have lived to the age of one hundred seventy when most imps seldom made it to eighty. She would know the instant that Blitz and Krieg Miller penetrated her wards that she would have to move somewhere safer; they had given her no chance to flee the building. The first thing that Krieg had done upon exiting the portal into Lust had been to Darkanchor the building, layering Abyssal power over the structure so thickly that any attempts to use portals would be suicidal at best, and capable of far worse than mere death at worst. Ruut couldn't flee the building. She could take time to tear down the Darkanchor, that impish counterpart to the Angelic Anchor spell, but if she did that Krieg would know exactly where she was doing it from. No, Ruut was prudent. She had one of two choices.

Go up the tower, to where she kept her magical bullshit.

Or go down into the bunker.

Her perceptions were so very attenuated right now, the room she was standing in blurry, the sounds of it almost inaudible to her. She was roughly sure that another cluster of Croneguards had rushed in to kill them, but she trusted if nothing else the ability of her Uncle to murder idiots in droves. There were Wonderworkers in the bunker. She could feel them. They were all weak, tiny sparks against darkness. Not the bonfire that Ruut would be. She couldn't see these Wonderworkers, but knew from the number of them in the volume containing them, they had to be practically atop each other. Or perhaps more accurately clinging to each other.

"And there but for the grace of Blitz go I," Krieg muttered. A year and a lifetime ago, a girl called Morgan Nuckelavee would perhaps have been shepherded into that room down there, huddling in the dark with fear and uncertainty of her companions while fury exploded above her. But Krieg had murdered, buried, and cannibalized the best of Morgan Nuckelavee, and from that miserable skeleton, Krieg Miller had been created. Krieg Miller the Prodigy. Krieg Miller the Ur-Crone-Unrecognized.

Ruut was prudent. If they were somebody else, doing something suicidally brave and actually raiding Sietch Nuckelavee for Wonderworker blood and slaves, she would not be amongst them. Let the fools take a few children. Ruut would either steal them back, or just have her family create more Wonderworkers through the exercise of their enslaved loins. To put it another way, Ruut Nuckelavee was a coward. And she would not defend what she could replace.

She was up the tower.

She severed the connection to the mycelial network that she'd spawned through the Weepstone of the building, and her eyes focused on Blitz, who was in the process of strangling a Croneguard, while Maelstrom was arduously pressuring a Shock Guard's dagger, still held in his own impish hand, through his own chest. "Upward! Ruut Nuckelavee cowers above in the tower, surrounded by her slave-warriors!" Krieg shouted. She felt a quite delicious anger in her, as Blitz began to laugh.

"I guess you get to die quicker, then!" Blitz said, and rose to stomp his boot-heel into the throat of the Croneguard and leaving him to gurgle and rasp his way to death as Maelstrom threw the Shock Guard into a pile, still lanced through by the knife that had been intended to kill the three of them and not himself. That she'd been insensate long enough for there to be a pile of carcasses was concerning. "Let's go hunt this bitch down!"

"I'm really starting to dislike imps that look like you, boss," Maelstrom noted, his usually worried face tight with anger.

"That means you're payin' attention!" Blitz said. He kicked the door to the upward stairwell open, only to get a death-wind to the face. Krieg, despite herself, flinched at so horrifying a magic released from its containment and levied at them all. She had to quickly claw her hands up and summon a prismatic wall to deflect that wind of smoky, grey, wailing entropy and death away from she and the Hellhound. Blitz just stood in the middle of it, unbothered because he didn't even know what a death wind was, let alone how it was supposed to kill him. He carefully lined up a shot with his luger and plugged the Wonderworker who had used that canned ruin against them. The instant he fired, the wind stopped pounding into this room, and a number of other screams could be heard from the stairwell above, likely because when the Wonderworker died, he tipped the wind upward just for a moment.

Krieg was quick to enter the stairwell as Blitz began to calmly ascend, reloading his guns one-by-one, not even looking ahead of him. She wished she could have said he was trusting the Remit of Lucifer to protect him. The fact was, he was just that damned sure he wasn't going to die by the time he got where he was going. And he had little to fear. Exactly as Krieg had predicted, the death wind had scoured the stairwell of any sort of opposition.

"Vengeance is coming, Great Grandmother. Nuckelavee dies today," Krieg swore.

To Uller, it was shocking to see what Clan Cruac had been up to here in the deepest recesses of Lust's swamps. While he had expected some degree of comfort from them, he hadn't expected crystal towers with shining faces that cast out gloomy un-light to mask the presence of Seitch Cruac from overhead view, hadn't expected broad marble-cut roads alive with magic to keep them perpetually spotlessly clean, hadn't expected magical infrastructure equal to anywhere else in Hell, even amongst the very highest.

This city in the marsh was an exercise in impish hubris and disdain. Of a select few impish Wonderworkers saying 'I can do better than all of you'.

It was so divorced from Uller's pitch-black, dank, cold upbringing as to practically tilt his head for him. He had grown up with hunger as a companion and violence a looming promise, of precarity and darkness and want hounding every step they took. To see such decadence curdled him with not with envy, but with scorn. In another lifetime, he might have wished to live in such environs as these. But having met the crones of Nuckelavee, and more critically met Krieg Miller, now his one and only impulse was to burn it all to the ground.

He and Krieg's mother were being subtle where all of the other invaders of Sietch Cruac were being overt. Uller could understand Moxxie and Millie's complete refusal to be anything but thunderous violence incarnate. They had that right. And Blitz Miller was the Proxy. He could do as he willed. Uller, though, was an interloper in more ways than one. And he didn't much doubt that if Nuckelavee could get their hands on him, it would be a very slow and very unpleasant end that befell him.

"That's the hub," Tilla said, gesturing toward the building which had a lot of confused looking modestly armored imps standing outside of it. They were talking amongst themselves, and looking into town both at the Temple To The Seething Black, where no doubt they had taken the babe to be 'inducted' into this miserable fucking family, and to the Tower of Gray, once a nowhere tower unimportant in the greater scheme but with the death of the Kellion family of Clan Cruac a century ago, Nuckelavee had made the Tower of Gray a seat of power. In the former, they were being justifiably murdered for the frankly stupid decision of taking a babe from the arms of its terrifically violent mother. In the latter, they were getting a visit by the Voice of the Devil Himself. Uller gave a moment to think, then turned to he and Tilla. "How are we..."

"Glamour," Uller said.

She flicked a glance back at him. "Glamours are fiendish magic. We'll need something else."

"I'm not debating that fiends use glamours. I'm not even debating that theirs would probably be better. But I'm saying that it can be done," Uller said. He began to focus his power inward, and then began to trace lines in the air with his fingers, arranging the internal powers that Krieg had taught him how to tap and turning what was once a sterile birthright into an orchard of power. He finally spoke the word Kiig, of the face-not-one's-own, and saw a change come over Tilla, as her body seemed to shrink by a foot and her face grew indistinct and unimportant. She was still a tall imp, but no longer freakishly so. And while Uller couldn't directly see the effects on he himself, he knew that the Thaumaturgical Glamour was concealing his wings. Maybe that'd be enough. "Alright. Look concerned but not panicked, and we might be able to just walk past them."

"If they're Thaumaturges..." she began.

"We'll burn that bridge when we get to it," Uller prompted, urging her forward. The sooner they transitioned to wherever the fuck Sietch Kheruk was, the better for all involved.

Crossing the road left Uller in particular feeling like he was walking through town naked. He was the furthest thing from it, wearing what few Arcane Garbs that Krieg didn't claim for herself (mostly because she was already wearing better versions of them, and their affects did not stack) he was wearing more protection than some soldiers on the battlefield. But Uller knew that their survival hinged on the long-horned Lust imps not noticing the paper-thin glamour over the pair of them as they moved now abreast to to the guards of the Portal Crux.

Uller knew he was sweating. Sweating buckets, even, and when one of the guards look him in the eye, his heart practically stopped beating in his chest. But that look was only a moment, before he looked past Uller to Tilla, in her now reduced form, and then one of the guards beside him asked him something that was so strangled in thick creole that Uller couldn't interpret it. He just swallowed past the boulder that seemed to have mysteriously appeared in his his throat, and kept walking. The doors were still open, but there were more Crux guards within. They were talking animatedly, and glaring at the incoming portals from other Sietches. Some of them had weapons pointed at those portals. Did they think that they were being invaded from without?

Well... they were... but not like that.

He was considering asking which portal lead to Sietch Kheruk, but he felt Tilla grab his forearm and saw her nod at one in particular which had very little attention being given to it.

A loudspeaker squawked to life, and began to announce "Attention all daughters and sons of Cruac, the Crux is being closed to all transit due to an ongoing emergency. Do not attempt to leave the Portal Crux. Do not attempt to transit any portal."

Even with the glamour over her, Tilla's eye-twitch was notable to Uller. They were running out of time, and the Crux guards were starting to break away from their little clusters and start to shepherd groups of Cruac imps to benches used for 'holding areas'. Tilla didn't speak, she just strode forward, intent on getting to that portal before it was shut down.

"Ho there! You two! Go to the benches!" a call came, no doubt for Uller and Tilla. Both ignored them.

They kept walking toward Kheruk.

"I said get to the benches! We're under emergency orders!" the soldier said, and sounded closer this time. Uller flicked a glance back; the armored imp was jogging to them. He'd catch them thrice over before they made it to the portal. So Uller quickly looked around, and spotted what could buy them time.

"We are going to benches," he said, not trying too hard for the regional patois, and pointing at a section of benches that were ahead of them instead of behind.

"You don't sound like you're from around here..." the guard said, reaching for a wide-bored flintlock kept at his side. Uller was about to stammer something when Tilla cuffed him upside the head. Out of sheer instinct, Uller almost grabbed his own hidden flintlock and shot her for that.

"Didn't I learn you to talk properly, fool!" She belted out, the accent that she'd essentially eliminated with her time in Pride not only back, but thicker than ever. "Don't you talk back to the soldier, boy! Say you're sorry for backtalk!"

"I'm..." Uller began, only just beginning to get his heartrate down to a livable level. Turns out those memories weren't as 'in the past' as he liked to claim.

"Don't even you little shit. I swear to Mumsa that you're such a fuckin' embarrassment." She turned to the guard and offered a deliberately brittle smile. "Forgive my boy. He's got the big stupid, sometimes."

"Have a seat, Ma'am. We'll sort this for all'y's," the guard said, nodding sternly to the bench ahead of them, where a group of men from late teens to late middle age were all sitting with their eyes on the floor. There was one woman amongst them, also middle aged, with a stern look on her face like she had never had a good day nor a satisfying orgasm in her life.

"What now?" Uller asked. The guard didn't follow them, now that it was clear they were following orders, even obliquely.

"Wait for those two to get to there," she indicated a pair of strolling guards, and then a spot ahead of where they currently were, "then we make a break for the portal before they can pull that," a glance to a dark red crystal that hovered slightly quivering above a ritual plinth, "and close it on us."

"Keystone?" he asked. Tilla nodded.

"Well, what do we..." Uller began.

"What is that?" the bitch-faced woman demanded, stepping free of her cluster of beaten-down Dullbloods and glaring at the pair of them.

"I'm... sorry?" Uller offered.

"What is that shit you've got on you? Is that..." she narrowed her eyes, the yellow starting to fade as the black blood flooded into them and magic began to come to her beck. Oh fuck me with a fire-hydrant, Uller thought.

"Who taught you how to talk to people? A pig? Mind your business whilst we mind ours," Tilla demanded, taking an aggressive stride toward her. The woman snapped her head at Tilla, then blinked in shock. She then tilted her head upward, staring at a spot a foot above where Tilla's current visage ended.

The spot where her head actually was.

"Intru..." the woman began to scream, pointing at the pair of them. Fuck!

She was cut off by four startlingly loud gunshots. The first three hit her in the chest, two impacting the same lung and turning her, so the third hit her in the armpit and likely pulped her heart. All of that was rendered moot by the last shot, dragged upward by recoil that first punched through the hag's buck-teeth and then pulped the lower parts of her impish brain. The grouping was atrocious, but Tilla'd had little time or reason to practice with a gun. Only the close distance meant those bullets all hit.

"Run!" she shouted. And Uller did exactly that. He flashed a gesture and spoke the words of power that brought up a slanted wall of shining force, getting it manifested just in time to catch the incoming bullets of the Crux Guards closest the door. The one who had directed them to the bench took more time aiming, and fired again as they had crossed most of the distance to the gaping portal to the far-flung corner of Lust that held Sietch Kheruk. And when that guard fired that bullet, it shot straight through Uller's barrier as though it was not even there.

The impact was a brilliant constellation of pain exploding up and down Uller's left arm, as the bone there had caught the bullet before it could pound into his chest instead; the bone was shattered, and hot, stabbing agony began to follow. Uller stumbled, but he couldn't fall, because Tilla grabbed his other arm and dragged him back to his feet. Just another ten feet to the portal. Eight. Five. He could feel his glamour was failing, and that his barrier was doing likewise. His left arm now dangled uselessly at his side, screaming with anguish for every movement he made. But he still needed to do something... so he dragged his physical pain out of his injury, leaving him pleasantly numb to it, and condensed it into a Pain Elemental. And when he did, he could feel so much pain in the air that his plan changed slightly, and he condensed that as well, until he had a shrieking orb hovering above his right palm that was almost the size of his torso. And when he cast out that hand and spoke the word of release, a fan of Pain Elementals shrieked away, intent on striking every single person on that side of the room that he could see.

Tilla's grasp of the back of Uller's collar dragged him almost off of his feet, stumbling backward then righting himself as the portal loomed in front of them. Through it, she could see that Kheruk only had one portal in its Crux, the one leading to Sietch Nuckelavee, and that portal only had one guard. That guard flinched and scrambled for his gun as he saw pistol-packing Tilla approach, but she fired the last two rounds in her cylinder into him and he fell to the ground, clutching his neck which sprayed black blood according to the beating of his dying heart.

Uller felt the transition, of being once in one Sietch, then his body stretching until it was also in another. And he reached out with his right hand and made a beckoning flick. A Black Bind raced out, looping behind the crystal, before contacting and launching the Keystone, zipping to him and barely making it through the rapidly closing portal to smash rather painfully into his face. Oh, but to have some impish form of telekinesis. "Alright," he said, grabbing the stone and ignoring his nosebleed. "Until they come get this themselves, they can't portal here after us."

"You're bleeding. A lot," Tilla said.

"Yeah. I'll deal with that in a minute," Uller said.

"In a minute you'll be unconscious. Deal with it now," she ordered. Uller gave a begrudging nod and began to focus his Thaumaturgy into the wyrd that Moxxie had invented a few months prior, to rewind his injury. It took a few seconds, but the lead ball embedded in his humerus was shoved out of the wound, which knitted closed behind it. He felt like hammered dogshit, still. Hopefully he didn't get shot again. He had no idea how Krieg and Moxxie could do that so easily. "Now that you're not going to die, get up. I want my man back."

Moxxie ordinarily would have been a little perturbed by the level of violence he was inflicting on people right now. Today was not an ordinary day. He knew, with his intellect spinning on the verge of catastrophic excess, that he was only a hair away from utter insanity. It was a strange sensation, to know that he was standing with most of his hooves already over the precipice and not to care. If anybody got in his way, today, they would die. No matter what. No matter who.

Millie was lost to her rage right now. She had less control by far than Moxxie did, and consequently a lot more experience how to ride it whenever it overtook her. The intricate mosaics that lined the walls crumbled and fell from their seating from bodily impacts of her wrathful violence, prompting her to abandon her axe which was being clutched near its head by a desperate Templeguard, turning her attention to the imp next to her who was armored like an Archangel. She took him and slammed into into the wall, again and again, unable even with her augmented and lunatic strength to damage the armor. The flesh on the inside was not so fortunate; blunt impact still pulped the imp that the armor protected from without, so that when she threw him down amidst fallen tiles, he essentially oozed out of the eye-slits of his panoply.

Moxxie advanced, holding out a hand that pushed a prismatic wall ahead of the two of them; all of the many, many, many bullets that were being fired down this hallway impacted into his protections and failed. He even felt somebody trying to be precious with his attack and use a specially ensorcelled bullet to zip through a standard ward. By the time he fired it, Moxxie twisted his wyrd into a new form, one he invented on the spot, which replaced an impassable barrier with a barrier with perfect inertia; when that bullet struck it, it did not stop, but instead deflected straight back, blowing off the imp's hand when it hit. Then, dropping that prismatic barrier for a moment, Moxxie brought up his shotgun, and pressed it to the eye-slit of the now-ignored-opponent of his wife, that had only now stumbled back into the wall opposite the one she'd pulped his counterpart against. Moxxie barely felt the recoil of sending buckshot into that imp's face.

Millie reclaimed her axe as Moxxie stormed forward. The guards were retreating, shaken by what they saw approaching them. Moxxie knew he was not an intimidating presence; he was small for a Wrathling, and Millie likewise. These Four-toes overtopped the pair of them by half a foot or more. But they retreated as though faced with an Angel. And Moxxie gave them good reason to. When the one who'd tried to use his special bullet against Moxxie finally regained enough composure to try to pick up his flintlock and fire again with his other hand, Moxxie easily sidestepped it and blew the left side of his head off, spraying gore into the eyes of an older woman whose hands flailed and she tried to come up with words of power to use against him. Even as that imp died, Moxxie grabbed the abandoned flintlock (which was innately magical because flintlocks weren't supposed to be able to fire more than once without a lengthy reload, yet still this one could), pointed it at the lesser crone and fired. The last instant saw a man jump to intercept the bullet, so Moxxie had to shift his aim to still hit the crone through the man; while it killed the dullblooded servitor, the orb of lead still passed through him and blew the woman's jaw off.

Good enough.

"Hold them! Don't let them into the Sanctum!" a call came from the far end of this hallway, with its large, ornate doors. Millie grabbed the half-headed imp that Moxxie had offed and used him as a shield to guard her charge forward, heedless of the gunfire because there was a dead guy to absorb it. She levelled her axe in a broad and arcing sweep, one that intercepted a pillar holding up the ceiling. In ordinary circumstances, the two foot thick pillar of golden-veined marble would have won in any fight against mere steel. But this mere steel was being augmented by more than just the desperate strength of a frenzying mother; there was something of a force that she manifested around her with every strike, one he had never seen before, something unlike Thaumaturgy but obviously from the same wellspring. The axe-head cleaved through the stone, then through the three imps in front of her, separating their torsos from their legs, crushing through their lesser Mage Armor and creating six new pools of black blood where the resulting carcasses landed.

The doors were locked and barred. And Moxxie didn't care. He barely even cared about the last Templeguard in his unbreachably thick armor that was pointing a blunderbuss at Moxxie's wife. When he fired it, it hit her in the side, shredding her dress there. Not even caring that she'd taken a massive hit, she swung that axe now at him. But for all her force could put steel through stone and Mage Armor alike, the armor of the Templeguard was special. He'd have to steal a suit once he had Bea back. No, the axe head slammed into the Templeguard's armor and there it stopped, rebounding back slightly as Millie finally encountered something that her axe could not bisect. Moxxie wasn't about to allow this dullblood even that victory. He clawed with his hands, and invoked the Great Unmaking, a wyrd of war that infested the only visible part of that imp – his eyes – with malignant unmatter, which would quickly blind him, then slowly infest and consume him. Within seconds he fell to to the floor, clawing at his face. He screamed, growing louder and more desperate as Moxxie and Millie stomped toward the doors that lead to their little girl.

Moxxie didn't care if the man was in pain. He'd earned it.

One of the downsides of Thaumaturgical Portals was that they tended to fail when being sent into places of thick magic. And the Palace Temple of Cruac was one of the most magically dense places in Lust. So he had to use another, far older and more niche ability that the Codex Cruac in Alabaster had taught him. How to expand space and contact it. He made a tearing motion, and the minute gap between the locked doors was torn wider, as the space was violently increased until it that hair's-gap that had existed between the two doors now was wide enough that both Moxxie and Millie could storm into the next room walking abreast.

On the far side, Crones and other Wonderworkers, even ones that didn't have the Nuckelavee sigil inked onto their forehead, began to call their magic to them to defend themselves. Millie launched herself, a ballistic missile in impish form, managing to half-decapitate one that was ahead of her, until her movements came to an utter halt, held still by an unchanging of entropy so that time around her could not advance. It also left one of the Crones with half of a neck and experiencing all of the pain of dying without being able to do anything about it.

With Moxxie's new eyes, he could see the traces to that bubble of timelessness. How strange, that so many different weaves of magic existed that all fucked with time in some way or another. Imps had a very narrow and mediocre method, which Millie was encased in. As long as she was in there, she couldn't massacre them all, but neither could she be hurt by any means, even magical ones. And since Moxxie knew which of the Thaumaturges were doing that to his wife, he targeted them specifically. With one arm he warded incoming Pain Elementals and hexes, while the other flashed through a motion that ended with the words of power Ursḫ Elḽ, and the air froze in a snap into a crystal around the crone, the temperature of that little pocket of space-time dropped within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero.

With one Thaumaturge unable to keep maintaining the spell, Millie began to move again, with ponderous slowness, her howl becoming audible again, as was the shriek of pain and death that the crone being so murdered offered in response. Moxxie had to quickly zip aside, as a Dart of Un shot toward him. It was traveling slowly, only a few dozen miles per hour. From the Codex Cruac, he knew that Darts of Un could be sent as fast as a bullet. As such, he was able to get behind a pillar, causing it to crash and begin to dissolve the aesthetically pleasing marble under its payload. He didn't even need to look to quickly grab his shotgun from the strap, wrap his arm around the pillar, and shoot the crone that tried to dissolve him. He knew it wouldn't kill her; she'd have Mage Armor by now and he wasn't going to waste time empowering a shell to only kill one woman at this point.

Instead, he dove from one pillar to the next, watching as another Dart of Un tried to curve and follow him, only to swing wide and hit the far wall. There, he could see the Thaumaturge that was keeping his wife's murder-rate at one per month. While Moxxie's tank was getting close to empty, he still had enough left in him to use their own tricks against them. So when he feinted a dodge this time, it was intended to draw out another Dart of Un. This time, he looped a tether of his own power around it and swung hard, as though catching a sling-bullet in a sling of his own, then hurling it back, though not at its source. He hit the Thaumaturge holding his wife in temporal treacle. The Thaumaturge, not realizing he was about to be under attack until the last minute, flinched; the Dart, having the Signature of somebody whom his Mage Armor white-listed, let the thing slip right past, and punch him right in his stupid fucking mouth.

He fell shrieking, as his head turned to pudding over the course of a few seconds. And in those few seconds, Millie, now at her full speed, rampaged as a near blur of black and red, the only sounds being her roar, the sound of metal cleaving meat, and the terrified shrieks of the massacred.

Eight seconds after Millie was cut loose from her time-prison, this... rectory... was now party only to two furious Wrathlings on their hooves, dozens of Lustling carcasses in various stages of admitting their own death, and a seething fury that swamped both heavier than the stink of sticky black blood.

"Where's my Bea?" Millie asked, shouting at the people whom she'd rendered as firewood. They were in no condition to answer her. She would have snapped and murdered any hand which touched her flesh except for Moxxie's in this moment; by instinct alone she knew it was him when he reached her, laying a hand on her now bare shoulder.

"Inductions are in the Altar Chamber. Down in the heart of the Temple. They'll be guarding every stairway down," Moxxie began.

"Then they will die on a FUCKIN' SLOPE!" Millie said.

"They couldn't stop us with Satan on their side," Moxxie promised. But that was an empty one, to him. He knew that if they'd asked Satan politely, he'd have done all of this for them himself. But they wouldn't have asked. Nuckelavee of Clan Cruac had sown cruelty. Now, they were going to reap some fucking ruin.

The ascent was butchers' work. Krieg was saving her strength, letting it surge and pool in her belly like gasoline in a car. She was a brilliant and prodigious learner of the Thaumaturgical Art, she accepted that accolade without reservation. But she was still all of seventeen years of age. While she had indeed cracked access to Wyrds once thought lost, or if not lost reduced by distance from their simpler, purer forms, she was still very young. Ruut Nuckelavee, conversely, was very, very, very old. Simple math said she had lived ten of Krieg's lifetimes. More telling was that she had produced children until the age of one hundred and eight. There was such a clear wellspring of power in Ruut Nuckelavee that it was obvious even a century ago that when Kellion fell, Nuckelavee was the obvious choice to replace it. This would take Krieg's all.

She didn't much need to interfere, though. Maelstrom may have been too tall for the rooms of most impish dwellings, but the Tower of Grey had 'vaulting' ceilings that rose all of eight feet. He had more than enough room to rampage, breaking imps wearing impenetrable armor by turning joints into torture implements, often ending by disarticulating a leg or arm and letting the imp bleed to death in his state of pain-shock and concussion. He had a look of solemnity on his face, that this was a task not desired or appreciated, but required, and one that he would see done to its bitter end.

Blitz, on the other hand, was laughing and shouting, bounding from target to target with a renewed vigor that wound back the clock on his body. By quirk of time-travel shenanigans, he was now practically the same age as his own mother. But as he suplexed a half-armored Croneguard out of a window to a long drop and a grisly death, he was beaming as though he hadn't more than a month on Krieg herself. He was covered in sweat and he was breathing somewhat heavily, but even Maelstrom had slowed down more in his bare-handed rampage than Blitz did.

"I think we're running outta tower there, kid," Blitz said, striking the shards of glass from his gloves as there was a loud, wet crunch and Maelstrom tore off the last remaining Croneguard's right leg right at the hip, causing spurts of black blood to splash the wall near where the victim had fallen. Maelstrom idly tossed that leg out the window, after the by now defenestrated man.

"That means there is very little room now for Ruut to hide," Kreig said. There were very few Wonderworkers here. That would have struck Krieg as odd, were it not for the extenuating circumstances. They were forceably inducting a stolen child today. A child of unknown blood and unknown protections. The likely majority of the mightiest of Cruac's current generation of wonderworkers were likely directly in Moxxie and Millie's crosshairs. In another world, a girl named Morgan might have been among them. But since Morgan was dead and Krieg had surmounted the carcass of miserably small dreams and paltry hopes, she felt absolutely no pity for those who were about to be massacred.

She hissed under her tongue as the three of them cleared out of the room, and moved toward the next stairwell that led upward. Krieg could feel Thaumaturgy being wound up there. She didn't know what exact wyrds, but it was clear that somebody strong was doing magical bullshit.

"Rejoice, Uncle; we'll be killing our Gramma-Ma shortly," Krieg said.

"Oh she's just up from here. Can you point her out?" Blitz asked, looking at the ceiling. She pointed out a rough area, because Thaumaturgy was hard to localize when there was part of a building in the way. Blitz's grin ratcheted a bit higher, and he pulled his Convertable Rifle from his coat, and with only a moment of thought to aim, snapped all five shots of AP that were in the internal magazine, five bullets that ripped through infrastructure with ease, before the size of the barrel noticably contracted to fit the bullets in the external magazine. The magic that Krieg had seen up there paused, no doubt as Ruut was diving for cover from bullets assailing her from a thoroughly unexpected angle.

Nuckelavee would likely be doing the smart thing, Krieg recognized. Casting Wyrds on herself to augment and supercharge her, to erase weaknesses and install immunities. And Krieg saw absolutely no reason whatsoever to handicap herself by not doing likewise. Ruut would have more than a century and a half of primacy as a Crone to come up with fiendishly clever protections. And Krieg would have to use all she'd learned from the Most Ancient Crones of Cruac to circumvent them.

The stairs up were laced with doom-hexes, which she spared the thought to pop before Blitz reached each of them, then went back to girding herself for the greatest magical fight of her life, and perhaps the most important one in modern impish history.

Blitz tried to barge through the door, but was reflected away by a warding spell. He snarled and rolled up his sleeves to throw himself at it again, but Maelstrom reached him at this point and gently guided him back. He motioned to the door for just a moment, allowing Krieg to attempt breaking the Ward. When she realized it'd take nearly an hour to do it, she took the faster option and merely degraded it. Maelstrom, taking her gesture to mean that the Ward was gone – it wasn't – he then turned and dove a hard slam with one arm into the door.

The Ward should have held.

But between the native flimsiness of the door and Maelstrom's admittedly goliath strength, he slapped the thing off of its hinges and sent it flopping flat to onto the floor of the room beyond. In the moment after that, a grey streak clipped Maelstrom's arm, and he let out a shriek of pain, falling back and down toward Krieg. She had to catch the stricken Hellhound on a Shining Barrier, at least long enough that she could get out from under him, as he writhed in the anguish of a Pain Elemental spreading to the chest.

"Beep beep bitch! Time to ARGH MOTHERFUCK!" Blitz shouted, making it one step into the room, before another Pain Elemental obviously nailed him also. Such a pity that of all the spells in Hell, Blitz actually knew what a Pain Elemental did. Krieg, only at this point managing to scrape her back along the rough stone of the stairwell to get past Maelstrom, finished the last and most important defense she could think of in this moment; the Carcass Mien. Her entire body went utterly numb, and she could feel nothing of the stone under her fingertips, the weight of her feet in her boots, or the exertion of having to come running all this way after a pair of murder-spreeing assassins. She strode into the room, and instantly had her body hitch slightly to one side. It didn't feel like an impact. It didn't feel like anything. She slowly turned her head to the angle that such an insult to her person would've had to come from, and saw there, knelt at the heart of a magic circle at the stone-backed side of the room Ruut Nuckelavee. Ruut, though, was still staring at Blitz, who'd made it further than Krieg into the room and was now writhing brutally on the floor.

"I warned you never to return to this place, you nameless, deedless nothing," Ruut declared, her wrinkled lips pulled into utter contempt. "You have achieved nothing and will be remembered for nothing, and the blood you have brought here will be taken into the Clan to make it greater."

"Eat...shit...gramma-ma..." Blitz said, stopping his writhing to sneer and glare at the woman who had, at the moment of his birth, declared and branded him as worthless.

"Such a vile tongue. Know that next I will send my children to Pride and reclaim your mother and her children. Their blood was always mine. And I will have it back," Ruut said. Ruut Nuckelavee was the most obviously ancient imp to ever look upon. Her back was hunched, all of her hair fallen out except for the black spines that some Lustlings (Blitz included) had in their place. Her horns curled on themselves like a slowly bleaching pastry treat, only Krieg was certain that if she bit into those all she'd end up with was broken teeth and a taste of bitter disappointment. "Your place could have been a part of something greater. Instead it will be but food for our crops."

"Fuck you," Blitz managed, and pushed himself to crawl toward her, his knife still in his hand, but she pointed first at him and then down, and thin cords of black viscous matter reached up from the floor, garrotted his neck, and dragged him down lest he be choked. Krieg had seen about enough. She cradled one hand behind her, as though setting a baseball for a pitch, and then with a mighty have, she condensed magical power into a heedless bolus, and sent it racing into the bubble of protection that any sane Ruut Nuckelavee would have around her.

The ball crashed into the barriers like a shot-put into insanely thick glass, crushing layers of Thaumaturgical ward under its sheer inertia, before it finally was spent. That got Ruut to finally look up from one 'failure' of a descendant and look up at 'another'. She blinked at her, confused. Though her eyes had a gross blue film over them, they were still black from pupil to edge just as Krieg's were. She stared at Krieg as though she could scarcely believe what she was seeing. But that confusion fled as Krieg reeled back to create another Shatterball, and with a motion fast as a gunslinger's quickdraw, Ruut drew, condensed, and cast out a Pain Elemental at Krieg. The young Thaumaturge didn't even try to dodge the attack of the old. While the impact of the Elemental into her body threw off her movements slightly, the pain failed to reach her currently deadened nerves, and when she threw that second Shatterball, another layer of Ruut's power crumbled.

Ruut got to her feet, glaring at the teenager who dared to stand in her presence and not kneel down before the self-professed glory of her own ego. It was fortunate the Carcass Mien numbed Krieg's emotions, because if she wasn't being magically sedated with regards to her feelings she may have expounded a few of them at her despised ancestor. "Those marks. You are one of mine," Ruut said, tapping several points on her own face which were mirrored with ritual scarification on Krieg's own. "You can do better than listening to this outcast. He has nothing. Nothing to offer, nothing to give, and nothing to stand for. Strike him down and you can return to the covens."

"I am not one of yours, Ruut Nuckelavee," Krieg said. That alone drew a hateful grimace to Ruut's face, and caused her to launch forward a Dart of Un. Krieg, though, had practiced that wyrd enough times to know an old fuck telegraphing casting it, and she intercepted it with a Dart of her own. When the two, each travelling somewhere between as fast as an arrow and as fast as a bullet collided, they both turned to grey slime, which landed with a fairly sad thwap to the floor next to Uncle Blitz. It wasn't even unsafe to touch the rapidly shrinking slime; so focused was it on consuming its impacted target (more corrosive slime) that the two slimes rendered each other down to nothing to the exclusion of all else. "You had your chance to try to keep me on side. Instead you had me lashed face-down on a bench."

"Which one are you, then?" Ruut said, tilting her head and narrowing those old, rheumy eyes at her. "Are you Isa's little shit? Isa should be taught how to raise her daughters better."

"What makes you think you even deserve to know my name?" Krieg demanded, then paused. If she heated herself to much, the Carcass Mien would falter and she'd be vulnerable to Pain Elementals again. So she let the anger drift away, and stared down her ancestor with disdain instead.

"I will either hear it from you willing, or tear it from your shrieking soul when I turn you back into what is useful to me," Ruut said.

"I am Krieg Miller, once called Morgan Nuckelavee. I am here to kill you. To prove that Nuckelavee's time has ended," Krieg said.

"More impressive than you have tried. More impressive than you have failed. And now those failures serve me, either in bondage, or in death," Ruut said, her hands forming claws, as she began to pull her massive energies to bear around her. Krieg just glared at the bitter, hate-filled and grasping old bitch in front of her. Even if she wasn't deadened by magic, she would have felt nothing about the thought of killing a deluded, senile old monster.

So Krieg pulled her own magic close. And the two crones, they began the most important magical battle in modern Impish history.

Sietch Kheruk stank.

The various Sietches of Clan Cruac here in Lust all served one of two purposes. They were either the seats of power of the various families of the greater Clan Cruac – families like the extinct Kellion, the incumbent Nuckelavee, aspiring ones like Drevisté, Balrock and Engi-Enno, or paltry ones like Voog – or else provided material services to the Clan as a whole. Some produced rare foods, others large amounts of staples like rice and greenfruit (which was neither green, nor a fruit). Still others produced magical trinkets and repaired infrastructure.

Kheruk, though, dealt in garbage.

It was a punishment Sietch, not quite as explicit as the Prison Sietch – called Prison Sietch, because the Crones of old hadn't been renowned for their imaginations – all those who lived inside the great, foul and oppressive backwater which was Sietch Kheruk knew that they'd been sent here because they, their parents, or somebody that they were close to had seriously fucked up, and now the choice was between this, the Prison, or banishment. And there were a great many Cruac imps, a number which until this past year included Tilla herself, that couldn't imagine surviving outside of Cruac's choking embrace.

The people of Sietch Kheruk therefore kept their eyes down, their leather-clad bodies tight in, and their attention firmly away from other people's business. This was a place of filth and refuse, where the worst that Nuckelavee wanted to still deal with were thrown and told to pick out anything of value from the rest of the Sietches' shit and garbage, and to transmute what was worth little but not nothing into something worth more. The people here didn't walk around with their chests puffed out, believing themselves falsely to be petty kings of Hell. They were wrapped in whatever they could to keep the filth off of their skins, and moved with the drudgery of people who knew it wasn't going to get better, but the alternative was to them far worse.

The buildings were all squat, unappealing by design, and likely about as ergonomic on the inside as a twisted ankle. All fell before the function of them. The Pillars focused magic without any glory or fireworks. The Factories enabled the rapid cycling of shit into not-shit. And the barracks were an intentionally uncomfortable place to rest between shifts. The barracks was a single, centralized structure just off from the center of the town, within walking distance to all of the paltry amenities afforded this place, and with doors on each of its uneven sides. Tilla pulled the young Envy imp along with her. She could feel that her own glamour had broken, but for the most part, Uller's was still up. Good for him; it'd keep these yokels from recognizing what he was until it was too late.

The building wasn't locked, because almost everybody in the town lived in this triple-stacked bunkhouse, with those few who didn't being overseers who were in a tower that overlooked the rest of the Sietch. Such overseers likely weren't even Nuckelavees, so Tilla had no reason to do something about them. To pass from outside to inside was to have the stench of shit and food-rot be replaced by the smell of sweat, blood and ejaculate. Still, Tilla was pretty sure there were worse places than here. She didn't want to think about them, though. There was a desk for a superintendant, but it was unmanned so Tilla plunked Uller in the chair so that he could catch his breath as she threw aside the current Domesday Book and looked for the one that referenced the previous year.

"What is..."

"Shush, child," Tilla said, as she riffled through the pages. Most of the rooms were inhabited by mere numbers, and incident reports would be classified thus. But every personnel number had exactly one listing of the name attached to it; when they were brought to Sietch Kheruk. So she zipped backward through the pages, past the days when she was rescued from Bal Matheer while three months pregnant and already puffed up from it. Zipped further back, until the day that the Crones finally declared 'enough!' and sent him away. And there, on the day that was burned into her memory, she dragged her finger down the page, along numbered incidents, looking for a name.

And there it was. Bartolomayo Mitvic.

"I found him. Let's go," she said, having already memorized his room number.

"Just a second," Uller pulled against her, words pitched low. "Are you sure that you're ready for what you're gonna see here?"

She turned a baffled glance back at him. "I'm going to save my lover. What else is there?"

"Well, for one he's wait!" he had to snap as she started walking up the gloomy, funk-riddled stairway to the next floor up. "I'm saying that he's in the same headspace you were when Blitz came for you!"

"Barto will come with me," she said. Uller outright grabbed her and pulled her to a stop. That a male was manhandling a woman who was clearly a member of the Nuckelavee family did not go unnoticed to the quiet impish wanderers that the uneven halls contained.

"You had to be drugged to get you out of Lust," Uller hissed.

"He will come. With. Me," She said again, ripping her arm out of his grasp and moving to the door. She had to pass by another clutch of spawn who immediately upon seeing the tattoo on Tilla's brow averted their eyes and tried to make themselves melt into the floor. Black blood damn it all, what had Ruut been doing with the Clan Cruac to make these people terrified of any descendant of hers? She forced the thought out of her mind, and upon reaching the door, she pounded on it with her fist.

"I'm just saying... moderate your expectations. And if all else fails..." Uller shrugged, and quietly produced a taser from a pocket. She glared at him, and shame-faced he put it away. She turned back to the door opening. And she had to tilt her head down, to look at a much shorter, much more pregnant imp.

"What do you want? We've already done our shifts for the week. Leave us be!" the woman said, looking brain-fuzzed by late pregnancy and likely not even entirely sure who she was talking to.

"Get out of my way, woman," Tilla said, pushing the pregnant imp slowly but firmly out of the doorway. "Barto! Bart are you here?"

"Wait... Why do I know that voice? Schel? Who is that?" the man's voice came from inside the microbarracks. She rounded a corner, and there she saw him. Bartolomayo, her dashing Betrayal imp, who was half-turned from feeding a baby imp that looked a lot like the woman who was now trying to get into Tilla's face and failing due to the foot of height difference.

"You get out! We're done of you for the week!" she said, even giving Tilla a shove.

"Schel no!" Bart said, quickly rising and darting past the long tables that were used to feed a number of families at once in a minimal area. He gently pulled her back, and she instantly tucked in beside him, one of her hands flat against his chest. Wait what? "Tilla... What are you doing here?" he asked.

"What am I doing here? What are you doing here with her?" Tilla demanded, feeling anger swell in her, but again she was pulled back before she could say another word by Uller, who quickly got between them and outright shoved her back. For all she was bigger than he was, Uller was not the rail-thin derelict that he'd been when he broke into their apartment months before.

"Tilla, stop!" Uller said, eyes flashing with a stubbornness that he'd had to have learned from Tilla's children. He held up a finger. "When you were bearing Krieg and August and Victoria, what were your circumstances?"

"I... what?"

Uller just tilted his head, as though he was making a point. And when she stopped being knee-jerk angry, and looked at Bart, who was baffled but happy, and this 'Schel' who was distrusting and fearful, she drew the obvious connection.

When they moved Bart to Sietch Kheruk, they paired him off with another woman.

And Barto did what he had to do to survive in Clan Cruac. He made the best of things.

Tilla puffed out a sigh. She had imagined things differently. That she would burst down the door and that Bartolomayo would rush into her arms. But Hell was seldom so kind. "I," she said, with deliberation and the same stubbornness that she had imbued into her children, "am here to get you out of Sietch Kheruk and take you to Pride Ring."

"What! No! Only death waits in the Beast's Ring!" Schel bleated. No, be kind, Tilla. She wasn't bleating. She was an ignorant yokel who only knew things if the propaganda of Cruac felt she needed to know them. She turned her gaze to Bartolomayo, her ten-years-younger lover who at least had seen some small part of Hell before his magical gifts finally doomed him to playing brood-stud.

"Look into my eyes, Barto. I have been living in Pride since the mid of last year. We will be safe up there," she said.

"You look so different," Bartolomayo said. "They way you stand. The fire in your eyes. Black blood... what happened to you?" He stood there, shaking his head, and then turned to Uller. "And is this your new lover?"

"What?" both she and Uller asked with equal and incredible incredulity. Uller immediately began to make dismissing gestures.

"No, she's far too old for me, and besides..."

"He's a child! The youngest man I've ever had was..."

"...learning magic to even think about that kind of entanglement..."

"...your last child and I've only just gotten time to think and..."

"I am not her lover," Uller said, pointing at Tilla.

"The only lover I've ever had, Bart, was you," she said, at the same time, pointing at Barto.

"I'm sorry... I thought that it was... well. Done," he said, his shining green eyes shamed and downcast.

"I'm still getting you out of here. You are going to be a part of our children's lives whether you 'thought it was done' or not," Tilla said. She pulled out her Hellphone and hit the quickdial for what could be considered her first grandchild. Loona picked up just after the first ring ended.

"What's the sitch on your end? I'm keeping an eye on Dad and that shit isn't going super well," Loona asked.

"Has Krieg started killing Ruut yet?" Tilla asked. There was a pause.

"Well, they're fighting, but I have no idea what all that shit does. You need extraction?" Loona asked.

"Yes. Give us a gate home," Tilla said. She then turned to her lover and his new doxy. "Grab whatever children you have. You're coming with us."

"It's not safe..." the fearful Schel tried to stress.

"It's got to be safer than here," Barto said, his mouth pulling into a stubborn line. He pulled away from her and grabbed the imp toddler who didn't look anything like him but a lot like Schel and held the spawn at his hip. "I've got nothing else worth bringing."

"Then let's get out of this shithole," Uller said, and gestured broadly to the portal which had opened directly behind Tilla, showing Loona looking distracted on the other side, the long table of the Proxy's Manse, and a bittersweet ending to Tilla's hopes and dreams.

The wyrds did not fly fast and furious, for that was not how a proper fight between Thaumaturges was waged. It was about outguessing your opponent, trying to figure out what they hadn't prepared for, and then suddenly using that to its fullest potential against them. Ruut almost instantly had Krieg on something of the back foot. Not because she used the unthinkable and unexpected, but because the thinkable and expected nevertheless hit like a truck.

She had tried such things as the Darts of Un, as the Pain Elementals, as the Snowgrave and the Creeping Misery. The usual attacks that would take out an impish opponent in a single well placed blow. But Krieg had come into this with a great deal of training in the defensive side of inter-Thaumaturgical combat. Mother had insisted that she learn no spell or wyrd until she had learned the means to defend herself from it. While that did slow her advancement somewhat, it meant that the more fiendish pieces of Ruut Nuckelavee's arsenal were ones that she was already prepared for.

"Way to go, kid! You mind cuttin' me loose so I can gut her?" Blitz offered from his place at the sideline of this duel. He obviously had no idea what was happening. That was to his benefit. Any time something deflected off of Krieg, even if it hit him it couldn't hurt him. His ignorance made him bulletproof.

"You are more adamantine than I would have expected, Morgan," Ruut said. "What traitor taught you these wyrds that keep you from dying? I am interested to know who must be disciplined for this obvious oversight."

"Fuck you," she offered.

"A crass tongue will offer you little. Was it Belulah that taught you? It couldn't be my great-granddaughter; she knew nothing. Belulah's mouth is too active by a half. Too eager to please, to explain what needn't be explained," Ruut's eyes narrowed.

"You're just looking for somebody to blame for what is ultimately at your feet," she said. That magic circle she was in was a bitch and a half to deal with. She needed a way through it. "But since I'm going to kill you soon, I'll let you die knowing that my mother in fact did teach me all that I have and all that I am. You failed her just as much as you failed me."

"Posh," Ruut said, and then tried to send out a fork of Darkning, a corrupt inversion of electricity that she quickly made a gesture before her chest and behind her back, so that when the black bolt hit her, it snapped through her arms, across her torso and then out the other hand behind her, blowing a section of the wall away and letting the sunlight in. She didn't show pain, because she didn't feel pain, but in the moment that Ruut's face torqued up as though she'd just swallowed a concentrated lemon, she used Rough's Method to undo the grisly damage that her defense had done to her own heart. After a few seconds, it started beating again, which was something of a relief.

"That in the end is all that History will remember of you, Nuckelavee. The Failure Crone. The one who tried to step into the boots of Kellion and failed so completely that it depopulated its own house," Kreig taunted with perfectly flat tones, as to risk inflection into her words was to risk allowing the Carcass Mien to fail. "A coward who sacrificed everything, and achieved nothing."

"Enough, stupid child! I have heard enough of your childish tantrum! Now die so that I may raise you up better!" Ruut shouted. She clawed forward, and invoked The Tide, abandoning finesse for brute magical force, to swamp her under the Thaumaturgical ruin of a hundred seventy years of hate-fueled longevity. And Krieg was pushed back, unable to hold it back on her own.

Focus, she thought! What am I missing?

Ruut was overpowering her, but her attention was no wholly on the Tide. For a moment Krieg considered that she had miscalculated fatally, devolving into a magical brawl. But her eyes caught the magic circle Ruut was centred in. And in that moment she knew that she was being an idiot. Not properly utilizing her intellect and her magic.

So she flicked some Darts of Un, ones that Ruut batted away, but that wasn't the point of them. No, the point of them was that they, deflected back, would land behind Krieg, in the beam of sunlight that penetrated this bleak sepulchre of rough hewn rock, perched against logic high in the sky. She could feel the Darts eating into the stone as the Tide forced her back, no doubt as Ruut intended to give Krieg the choice of plummeting to her death, or being suffocated by The Tide.

The instant she felt the time was right, she released her Darts, and rooted her feet.

And she was now standing in a basic Magic Circle of her own, cut into the stones around her. The Tide still tried to swell and consume her, but now she could match it, strength for strength. Ruut looked first confused, then furious. "Your tricks will not stop your death, Morgan! They will only make your body more mangled when I bring it back!"

"My name. Is. Krieg," Krieg answered her. She had been half expecting some new horrendous crash of might to bowl her down, to pressure or subsume her. But Ruut was now straining at her utmost, and Krieg was not. And even still, Kreig held. A smile came to her face, pain beginning to swell in her body as the Carcass Mien crumbled and her laugh began to sound. "You can't push me anymore, can you? This is literally all you have!"

"Insolent babe!" Ruut spat.

Krieg stepped forward, and she exerted that wellspring of her magical power, pushing against The Tide. And the Tide receded.

With even the slightest bit of footing, Krieg Miller was not just matching the vaunted power of the Undying Crone; she was beating it. She was overwhelming it. The grin on her face ratcheted up a notch, as she swept an arm up in a slicing motion that parted The Tide and caused it to slam through Blitz and into the wall. Blitz was unharmed, even as the floor around him was scoured, and the wall was blown apart, giving even more daylight a route to illuminate the contest between the paradigm of the 19th century which was at war with the paradigm of the 21st. She heard the Black Cords snap.

Just getting the pressure off her was a reason enough to do it, but the other reason would make itself clear in time. She took a step forward, bidding the Black Blades into being out of stuff not unlike impish blood, weapons that streaked toward Ruut with the intention of slashing her to ribbons. But though Ruut was able to easily deflect all those which had sought to part her flesh, those were not all of the blades. Krieg had aimed a number of them lower, or around and past Ruut. Aimed these tools which caused physical harm using magical means, to gouge out the important lines of Ruut's magic circle.

Krieg made an estimation that at... this point, Ruut's circle had degraded to the point where it was now more or less useless. And Krieg stepped forward, willingly, out of her own. Done was the conflict of careful poking and prodding, looking for weakness and seeking to end the fight with a single, decisive blow. Now, Krieg offered no instant of reprieve. The storm of her Thaumaturgies was draining her, leaving her feel light-headed and weak, but however bad she felt as she advanced as implacable as a golem toward the salty shrew of an imp that she was arrayed against, it was clear that Ruut was suffering more. Her body was dripping with sweat, one eye drooping as though she were losing control of the motor functions on that side of her face. Her pallor started to edge toward corpse-grey.

The young Thaumaturge kept advancing. Darts of Un. Pain Elementals. Frostgraves and Soulstorms. Burning Rakes and Kill-clouds, both lesser and greater. She launched all of them until her joints felt like they were tied together with rotting thread. But they all forced Ruut Nuckelavee to focus her entire attention on Krieg so that she could survive for even another moment. Every attack that Krieg sent out was one that the whole efforts of Ruut Nuckelavee were required to ward. The two women, young and ancient, were so locked into the conflict that for at least one of them, there was no world at all except for the other.

Which made it all the more shocking when Blitz, who had been freed when The Tide had severed the Black Cords holding him to the floor, limpingly lurched into the Mages duel that the two were fighting, and slammed his knife into Ruut's gut, before giving it a long twist and yank, and causing the old woman to fall to a knee, her guts spilling to the floor under her.

"What... what..." Ruut whispered. She glanced up. Oh, this. "I curse you, all of you! You will..."

"Maelstrom break this bitch's jaw!" Blitz demanded. And Maelstrom, who had extracted himself from the rubble that the destruction of half of this part of the tower had dropped on him, took two long strides into the room toward the ancient imp and kicked her in the jaw so hard that her lower teeth practically eclipsed her nose.

Her jaw now hanging useless, Ruut could do nothing as Krieg carefully walked to where the ancient crone was now knelt in defeat.

"You've offered your authority over us – over all of us – for the last time," Krieg promised, grabbing the ancient crone's horn to hold her looking her much younger descendent. "You might think you'll just get brought back from this, like you have every other time you died. But not this time. Your cronies are currently being killed by the parents of that child you snatched. And even if you could hire the services of The Bard to take pity on you... there aren't enough Thaumaturges left to raise you up, since you'll be dead."

"Oh we're gloating now? Can I get in on this?" Blitz asked.

"In a moment. I want her to know fear before she dies," Krieg said. She looked the cruel old fossil in the eye. "But to make doubly, triply, and especially sure, I did a bit of research on my own. And I found the Codex Cruac In Alabaster. Which taught me how to resurrect the dead. And the limitations of the casting. Such as what happens if it's done wrong."

Defiance and hate began to melt away, replaced by dawning dread.

"Yes. If the Resurrection is flawed, it does not bring back the spirit; it destroys it. And while performing the Resurrection is oh-so-very difficult... fucking it up is child's play."

Ruut tried to shake her head, but she lacked the strength even to do that, compared to the girl who held her in place.

Krieg turned to her uncle. "Have you anything to say?" she asked.

Blitz looked like he was about to launch into a long tirade, but then stopped, as though distracted by his own hand. With a sad look, he pulled the glove off of it, revealing the broad and textured band of white scar tissue underneath. The lingering echo of how he was in the earliest moments of his life declared worthless, unworthy, and incapable. Broken. He stared at that hand, then turned to Ruut. With a snarl, he slapped her across her shattered face with that hand that she had herself deemed worthless and impotent in the face of Cruac's magic. "I'm just glad I get to be here to watch you get killed for the last time."

"I'm feeling generous. I've already proven myself as better than the best of Nuckelavee. Blitz, please kill this rancid old whore," Krieg said.

"Don't need to ask me twice," Blitz said. With a movement that wasted no time on braggadocio or inefficiency, he reached into his coat, drew his Luger, and fired four shots directly into the skull of Ruut Nuckelavee.

And then, Krieg reached out, feeling with her last exhausted dregs of power to the vast interstitium that connected Creation to the Abyss that bordered it. To feel this was to feel the echos of all of the lives ever lost, be they Demon, Angel, or Human. She could even sense in a distant, distorted way the echoes of things more strange, things born outside of Creation that died within it. They were always distorted and foul. She ignored them. She looked for one echo in particular. One of hubris and cruelty and dogma. And since it was so recently dead, and the carcass was right there, the finding it proved to be simple.

She grabbed it with her magical self, tearing it from its thereafter, the first step of many that Resurrection demanded. In her mind's eye, she could see Ruut Nuckelavee's last dying embers shrieking in terror, aware and cognizant in this last moment of exactly what was about to happen to her. And instead of undergoing any of the steps that would result in a person coming back to life, Krieg instead did... nothing. She released her magical grip. She released Ruut Nuckelavee's soul. And now untethered to the Black Blood that seethed in the impish 'afterlife' (if such a thing could even be said to exist), Ruut Nuckelavee could do nothing, as her entire post-life being, her mind, her soul itself... began to unwind, shake itself apart. Dissolve into nothing, before a bass reverberation in the world scattered that nothing across all of both Existence and Nonexistence so that she would never be complete again.

And good fucking riddance.

"Uncle? I think it's nearly time to leave. Do you still have that stapler?"

"Of course," he said, pausing from grabbing his Hellphone to dig out the industrial stapler which had the words 'Fuck You Birch' engraved on its side. She took it, squatting down on the floor to write a little note on one of the many pieces of paper that'd been thrown about during the duel. When she had what she wanted, she gave a nod, and stapled her note to Ruut Nuckelavee's slack, lifeless face. Then, with a sense of bone-deep satisfaction that she wagered sex couldn't better, she exhaustedly lurched back through the portal which had opened bringing them back to Pride Ring.

A few hours from now, those terrified and disunified survivors of this maelstrom of death and vengeance would find Ruut's cadaver, and the notice attached to it in the most disrespectful way possible to it. And they would read Krieg's warning:

'This was entirely your fault. You came to Pride, which is owned by the Radio Demon and owned by the Family Miller. You stole a child that was under Miller's protection. The next time you trespass the Ring of the The Beast That Grins and The Legendary Thaumaturge, what comes to you will be so much worse than this that it will haunt your descendants into eternity. This is the only warning we will ever give you.'

And then a brief section about if they ever want to talk like adults, to send an e-mail and meet in Greed. Krieg was pretty sure that would never happen. Not now.

The massacre that lead down into the bowels of the Temple was all Millie, now. She had abandoned her unwieldy axe for a hatchet at this point, which had done exactly nothing to slow her butchery. Moxxie was essentially just following behind her at this point, unable to keep up with her maternal rage and incredible physique. But that was to both of their benefit, in a way; her taking the brunt of the killing of the now universally ceremonial Templeguard was giving Moxxie a chance to catch his wind, to refill his stores of magical energy that oozed up from the Abyss and pooled in him. He might well need it for what was to come.

Through halls that were lit by green flames and carved with scenes that displayed the family Nuckelavee's primacy over the other families of Clan Cruac – a piece of revisionist history that at least at one point made Moxxie gouge out a figure as he was walking past it – on the way to the heart of the heart of the chamber, where the most potent of the impish magic pooled and magnified. In fact, approaching it made it 'slop over' into Moxxie at an increased rate as well. So that in the time it took for Millie to lacerate, macerate, and obliterate the twenty Templeguard who had tried to form an impish barricade with polearms and shields against incursion to the deepest depths, Moxxie had what he gauged to be about half his entire wellspring back.

Millie paused, as she ripped her hatchet out of the deep dent in the Templeguard's helmet that had crushed his skull and ended his life. Her clothes were tatters, bruises and scrapes managing to show on her otherwise seemingly bulletproof skin. She didn't care. He didn't blame her. "Bea! We're comin' for ya sweetie!" she shouted as she launched herself in a drop kick to the ornamental doors that lead to The Core. Though the doors rang like a gong from the impact of her hooves against them, she only succeeded in sending herself flying back and into the carcasses she'd made on her way in. Moxxie helped her to her feet, which she didn't really need but seemed to prefer.

"Millie, honey, just stay behind me for a second. I don't know what's waiting in there. Can you do that?"

"I wanna kill'm all!" she growled.

"Oh, they're definitely all gonna die," Moxxie reassured her. "But let's not leave Bea down a parent when we do this. Okay?"

She seemed on the edge of being angry enough to ignore him, but because she hadn't quite made that leap, she gave an unhappy nod, and held her hatchets so tight in her fists that their hafts creaked. Moxxie then waved his hand, and used the magic that was intended to open these doors, by invoking a superposition force that made all closed doors open, and all open doors closed.

Instantly when the door flipped from being unassailably closed to starkly open, Moxxie had to hold up a Shining Barrier against a few panicked flintlock shots, then deflect away a Burning Rake, a Dart of Un, and a bolt of Darkning.

"Don't take another step into this chamber!" A crone who though quite old seeming, didn't have that impossibly aged mien that Ruut Nuckelavee had. She had the same heart-like tattoo on her brow that Blitz, Tilla, Barbie and every other Nuckelavee had. And so too did the other Crones in the chamber. All but one were women, every single one had that tattoo. All were older than Millie's parents at the youngest.

Moxxie wagered these were the children and grandchildren of Ruut Nuckelavee herself. He was about to take another step out of naked spite, but then saw that one of the younger (in this case, late middle aged) crones was holding a ceremonial knife above the deeply weathered stone altar. And upon that altar was the naked and flailing form of a black-haired imp spawn. Bea was shrieking in pain and discomfort. And when she turned her head a bit, Moxxie could see why.

These motherfuckers had put a tattoo of Nuckelavee's dominion on Moxxie and Millie's daughter.

Moxxie felt his eye twitch. Millie hadn't seen that, because if she had, she would have exploded into violence regardless of the danger to Bea's life. No. Moxxie would hold this unspeakable insult to himself as he came up with a plan. "I'm not moving," he said, his voice sounding alien to himself. A tone that he didn't know he was capable of making.

"It's too late. The child is ours now. Leave while your minds are still your own," the eldest Crone demanded, calling a swirl of dark energy to her hands.

"I...!" Millie began, but Moxxie reached back and touched a hand to her shoulder. He didn't look back at her. Just stared with almost blinding fury at the crones arrayed before him. He wanted them all to die. Horribly. Painfully. Slowly.

And he realized he had just the thing to do it.

"Millie, trust me," he said. "Just stand there."

"Drop your weapons or we will make Rava suffer!" the elder crone demanded. Her name was Beatrice, Satan damn it... But to placate the jumpy Thaumaturges, he reached around and dropped his shotgun. It was out of shells and thus useless to him anyway. But as he started to reach into his jacket and pull his many other, still viable firearms, he focused his attention and magic on Beatrice, and imagined a tight cone, with its point at Moxxie and its mouth opening so that no point of its wall touched the squirming babe.

And then he let his magic begin to drain.

The pile of guns continued to grow, and he could sense Millie's patience fraying. He leaned half toward her, and whispered something she would need to know. When she looked, her patience became a non-problem, as a deeply cruel and satisfied smile came to her face.

With the pile complete, he gave them a shove with his hoof, scattering the guns somewhat. "Just so you know, you've already lost," Moxxie said.

"You know nothing of Thaumaturgy, distant-blood. We have the secrets passed from mother to daughter for a thousand years!" the elder crone said with haughty tone.

"And I've learned the ones thought lost for an eon. Tell me... did you notice the blue glow in the room?" Moxxie asked.

A blue glow which Moxxie had been ramping up in intensity as he had disarmed himself.

A blue glow of steadily increasing ionizing radiation blasting out from Moxxie to all points in front of him, tearing apart everybody who either wasn't standing directly behind him – Millie – or in the tiny cone of denial he'd formed – Beatrice.

"That blue glow is death. Death unseen and unfelt in the air, until it's too late. Do you see those sparks in your vision when you blink? Taste the metal on your tongue?" Moxxie asked, the cruelest grin he'd ever sported in his life on his face. "By now you're probably starting to feel the itching. The burning. Your skin is dying, cooked by an invisible furnace," a crone who's pale red skin was starting to go black panicked, and launched a Burning Rake at Moxxie. With a gesture, he warded it so that it cut into the tile mosaics of the back wall. "Go ahead and try to cast your wyrds at me! You're already dead! I've just filled every single one of you with 50 Sieverts of ionizing radiation! Your skin is starting to decouple from your muscles! Your tendons are melting off of your bones! Your motor nerves are fried and dying!"

And true to Moxxie's shouting, the lone man of the Nuckelavee crones fell, beginning to vomit black onto the floor. Another almost joined him, flopping to lean heavily against a pillar holding the ceiling cut with thaumaturgical focus runes. When she tried to stand up again, it left a bloody arm-print on the pillar, and she overbalanced herself onto the floor, twitching and seizing.

The others tried to call their magic to them, but Moxxie had also spent some of his power threading his own magic into the pool of power that this sepulchre of pale green stone had created, poisoning it now that he had no further need of such a wellspring. And the other Thaumaturges, drinking deep from that well, found their own Wyrds stymied and blocked, as though the magic flowing through them had coagulated and clotted into vast, artery-clogging masses. The poison would pass in time, but in the moment, it left the other Crones trying to make their gestures with hands that started to sag and ooze, to speak words of power through throats that were already sloughing layers of radiation cooked tissue to no avail. Moxxie nodded, and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out the Hellphone that he'd kept 'for emergencies' for the better part of the last four years. It was terribly out of date even compared to his usual phone. But it could record video, and that was what mattered.

He started recording, setting the thing on a step, propped up so that the crones who were now screaming and thrashing with their skin coming off in chunks would be recorded for posterity. He took Millie by the hand and walked up to the altar, scooping Bea, who was the only thing on this side of the room not practically luminous with radiation, up off of the stone and putting her into her mother's arms. Millie immediately started weeping with joy.

"You caused this. You declared war on the Rough Family. And if you ever try to strike back at us, I will do something ten thousand times worse in response. This is the only warning that I'm ever going to give you. Our children," Moxxie pulled his wife close as he spoke to his phone, and those who would view his message. He looked to his daughter. Whom those savages had actually tattooed the Nuckelavee Sigil onto her little brow. How fucking dare they? "are off limits, and if you trespass against them, I swear upon Satan himself that I will bring ruin to this entire Ring. You've seen what I can do to a room full of Crones. Tell me that I can't do worse."

Moxxie then threaded the last dregs of his remaining power (as he was unwilling to drink from the wellspring he'd poisoned: Moxxie was not a moron), into rewinding the injury, the disrespect of the sigil put onto his daughter's brow, until the black of the ink was ejected, and her skin was cherry red once more. Moxxie nodded, then pulled his actual Hellphone. "Loona? We're done here."

The Hellphone he left behind continued recording for a half hour after the Rough family departed. And by the time anybody of Clan Cruac came down to check on Ruut's Eldest, they were already far too far gone for any magic of theirs to save. Ironic, that the only people whose magic could have saved these women (and one man) were the people that Cruac had made an undying enemy of.

It took the crones nearly two hours to finally die. They did not die cleanly. And few mourned.

"That really was an end to Clan Cruac's stranglehold on Impish Magic, now that I think about it. Don't get me wrong, it's my father's real interest in magic that saw it propagate to the extent that it did, but if he and Mom hadn't gone to the extreme lengths to annihilate all of the highest members of the Nuckelavee Family of the Clan Cruac in the... I'll say forty eight hours after my birth, they likely would still be down there, engaged in daughter-fucking and hoping despite a distinct lack of knowledge of genetics to create useful Wonderworkers.

My interest in magic has been more scholarly than practical, frankly. To understand why Impish magic, Thaumaturgy, works so differently from other sources of magic has been a life's endeavor. I consider it a piece of nominative determinism that Mom and Dad decided to name me Beatrice, after the last Ur-Crone, and the one who died in Pride. The Kellion Family were radicals and reformers, thus why they took their entire extended family up to Pride back in 1609. The Nuckelavees, in contrast, were regressive fundamentalists and narrow-minded as a result. Of course they got less success with their breeding program than Kellion did. Kellion'd sussed out Mendelian Inheritance before Mendel!

I'm getting to that, I'm getting to that.

The fact is, Impish Magic is widespread to a degree that was thought impossible even to the most optimistic Cruac, simply because we don't keep it under cruel lock and key anymore. There' s no reason to. The scientific method applies to magical theory just as much as it does to mathematics, engineering, or chemistry. And having more eyes on old magical problems has solved more problems in less time than was thought possible. I mean... look at all the humans using our magic these days! I'm pretty sure even you know a wyrd or two, Killjoy.

Okay, you don't. That's on you.

No, the Resurrection Magic is still bullshit. I'm still saying that after three decades of study. Resurrection is bullshit, and I will die on this hill along with my husband and kids.

And then some asshole will bring me back to life WITH THAT BULLSHIT!

-Beatrice Rough-Miller, PhD Heavy Energy Studies, Humbolt University of Berlin