Mornsef exhaled a plume of fog into the night air and tilted his head towards the atmostorm. Bare feet slapped the Juleck cobblestones as he walked on, futilely chasing the maelstrom on foot.

  Two planets, Dinn and Chur, dominated the sky. They hung so impossibly close, locked at the point where their atmospheres collided.

  A hazy screen blurred the stars beyond them—a graveyard of ships from an ancient empire, permanently drifting in low orbit.

  If Mornsef were a mortal being, witnessing the atmostorm for the first time, he would have thrown himself to his knees, praying for mercy. The people of Boslick didn’t flinch at the cosmic vortex. Why would they? It was there before they were born, and they assumed it would be there long after they were gone.

  The sky churned, perpetually rumbling like a roaring titan. Lightning clawed at the three worlds that caged it, dying short of every surface.

  Mornsef’s hand raised on its own accord, reaching for the monstrous seal that lashed the three planets together. Usually the atmostorm was pink, but sometimes shifted through the colors of a sunset. Today, it bathed the Tri-terra in orange effulgence.

  He continued, his hand stretched above him. The warmth pricked his palm, like a morning sunset, but much more sickly. Somehow, the mortals of this tri-world system had evolved to withstand the horrible radiation of the planetary seal. He drank its atomic heat greedily.

  The scars of war marred the city around him. Shattered glass yawned in open window frames, doors twisted, kicked from their hinges. Gas streetlamps, which usually would dilute the atmostorm light in a white glare, remained inert, no one left to mind them.

  The city garrison, along with the resistance group, the Nine Fingers, had mounted a pathetic resistance against Court Rahashel’s ghoul army, but there was no outcome in which the mortals should have prevailed until the House of Nyamar intervened.

  Mornsef understood the House to be a cult of warriors that had learned to express metaphysical genes, granting them powers rivaling those of the Courts. Beyond that, they served him—Nyamar—the progenitor of this domain of existence.

  On Dinn and Chur, lights spiderwebbed across their inky surfaces, denoting civilization, cities, and roads. Physics in lawful motion—a beautiful impossibility in pandemonium, where matter served only chaos, and the genisarchs banished abominations like him.

  Morself glanced at a building on the road curiously, never changing his forward stride. Heartbeats throbbed within. That was uncommon in this ghost town. With the new confederacy of Nine Fingers and the House of Nyamar, the majority of the Julleck population had abandoned Magistrate Rovers to join the coalition, seeking safety in numbers.

  “Hello?”

  Mornsef stopped at the sound and lowered his hand to find himself standing before a hill, set with hundreds of cobblestone steps, ending at the Julleck Cabinet Hall at the top of the rise.

  “Sir, are you okay?”

  The wraith glanced at the speaker, a city guard, hugging himself against the night chill. The mortal’s grey beard stuck straight down, haggard and unkept. His eyes studied Mornsef cautiously, though not unkindly.

  Behind him, two more guards sat on stools, backs to the wall, dozing with bowed heads, while a third glanced at the warm light from a nearby guard shack mournfully.

  “Sir, where’s your shirt? It’s freezing out.”

  Hearing the voice, the Guard’s sleeping partners flinched awake, instinctively reaching for their premernox gas rifles.

  Mornself frowned, glancing down. His lean, white skin seemed chiseled from marble rather than flesh. His baggy back pants sagged around his legs, but he was otherwise unclothed. His mane of red hair poured down his back, hanging past his waist.

  Cold? These mortals didn’t understand cold. After eons trapped in the Between, Mornsef wouldn’t even feel the cold of deep space.

  “Can you speak, son?” the old soldier asked, suspicion surrendering to concern. He stripped his wool cloak from over his coat, extending it to Mornsef. “There’s a fire in the guard shack if you need a place to stay.”

  Mornsef ignored the gesture and pushed past, starting up the stairs.

  “Hey,” the youngest of the guards exclaimed, jogging to stop him. “You can’t go there.” He grabbed Mornsef’s wrist.

  Mornsef stopped, slowly shifting to regard the ignorant youth.

  “We don’t have any extra food, so beat it!”

  “He’s mad,” another pitched in, gripping his rifle tightly.

  The old man, apparently senior among them, sighed sadly. “Keep him in the guard shack till morning. Best restrain him if he’s lost his wit. Poor sot‘ll die out here.”

  The guard holding Mornsef fished manacles from his belt, grumbling under his breath as he latched them onto Mornsef’s wrists.

  Mornsef stared curiously at the icy steel restraints. A simple contraption, but a variant existed on almost all populated worlds.

  The guard began pulling Mornsef toward the shack.

  “That’s not where I’m going,” Mornsef muttered, his voice smooth and soft, more like a witless child than a Panderrant who had been sealed in a black hole for eons.

  “You talk?” his escort demanded. “Retchgasket, I thought you were a loon—”

  “I’m here to kill magistrate Rovers,” Mornsef interrupted, staring at the guard, giving him a clear look at his grey eyes.

  The guard’s face soured. “Now listen here, that’s not funny—”

  Mornsef wrenched his hand from the cuff. Skin peeled back and remained in the steel, stripped clean from bone like a glove. His hand, now a claw of meat and tendons, seized the guard’s throat, choking off his cry.

  Mornself lifted, the mortal’s boots thrashing as they raised off the road.

  His companions cursed, leveling gas arms. Blood from Mornself’s hand pattered freely to the street’s stones.

  Tsshhhssss, tsshhhssss.

  Premernox shells hissed as bullets tore into Mornsef’s torso, starting the flow of hot crimson rivulets from his body.

  Mornsef’s lips twitched down as his gaze slid down to the damage.

  “Lich!” the old man screamed, ratcheting the action on his rifle and chambering a new round.

  “Lich?” Mornsef frowned. “No, here they call me wraith.” He snapped the young guard's neck with a single hand, dropping him to the steps.

  The guard shack door flung open, and another four men poured out, brandishing gas rifles.

  There was no negotiation, no call for quarter, no weapons lowered. A volley of thick slugs slammed into Mornsef, knocking him back.

  Each ratchet-action rifle held a cross-bolt magazine that fired six times before running dry. Mornsef ate the volley, each impact either rocking him or spraying him with gravel blasted free from the steps.

  The wraith barely kept his feet. Fat droplets of blood splattered on the stone from two dozen new wounds.

  The guards shouted a warning, fumbling to reload, but their voices came muted to Mornsef’s ears. The blood flowing from his body drew his eye nearly hypnotically. So hot, the mark of life, yet also death. How beautiful.

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  A scalding droplet ran down his arm, tracing his finger before dropping free.

  It never hit the ground, but froze, suspended in the air. Blood on the steps quivered, undulating as they lifted, gathering and drifting back up to his palm. The sanguine fluid reformed into a sphere, quivered as short, thorny vines writhing from the orb.

  The old man slammed a new boxy magazine into the side of his weapon, being the first to bring it to bear.

  Mornsef launched himself from the stairs, dropping on the man like a bird of prey and lashing into him with the animated tenderal. The barbed blood shredded the guard as readily as spinning steel.

  He dropped with a shriek.

  Mornsef twisted, snapping the blood chain around a rifle and jerking it free before whipping it back into the screaming, disarmed guard.

  Tsshhhssss, tsshhhssss.

  Tsshhhssss.

  More slugs spat at him from a pair of soldiers who had managed to complete the reload, and Mornsef darted laterally, quick as a viper.

  He lunged at the men, felling them with three savage strikes from his blood chain.

  His wounds continued to bleed, the ruby streams wrapping around his pale body and arms, feeding into the tendral. The writhing blood chain wavered, frenzied, lengthening before splitting into two.

  Mornsef snatched the base of the animated fluid and ripped the two tendrils apart before turning on the remaining men. Thorny vipers darted, struck, and shredded.

  One guard threw himself away from his comrades as fluid blades cut them down. With a cry, the man turned toward the city and sprinted from the carnage.

  Mornsef’s gaze snapped to the fleeing soldier. He snapped his hands together, drawing the barbed tendrils into a now much larger bloody sphere. He jerked a hand to the side, drawing several liters from the orb, which flattened into a disk in his palm, dripping serrations forming around the edges.

  The hovering saw blade spun over the wraith's palm, sending droplets flying outward only to snap back into the disk before Mornsef hurled it.

  The dark red blade launched at the fleeing man, slamming into his back and dropping him without a sound.

  Mornself panted, surrounded by motionless figures, the night suddenly silent again.

  Then, shouting from the landing at the top of the staircase made him tense.

  Mornsef turned.

  More guards poured from the Cabinet Hall on the hill. Not an army, but opposition nonetheless.

  Mornsef’s hands snapped to the side, his body tensing in concentration as he reached out to the warmth around him, claiming it before it could go cold.

  His wounds pumped blood, draining him. The red sapped from his hair, starting from the ends and drawing into his scalp, leaving the thick mane jet black. The white faded from his skin, the flesh becoming nearly translucent.

  His floating sphere of ichor split, each half morphing into four viper-like tentacles waving out of each hand. Not enough. Droplets snaked from the copses, syphoning through the air and fusing with the undulating coils.

  Slugs snapped against the stone around him. Mornsef shifted, eyeing the steep staircase between himself and the shooters. That would be a climb, even for him.

  The air misted around him, vapors drawing into the thick eight barbed trunks of living gore.

  By now, his prey would be fleeing. Best make quick work here.

  The air cleared, the last of the blood draining from the corpses around him.

  A bullet splashed through one of the wavering arms, tumbling harmlessly to the ground.

  Mornsef took a wide step back and braced himself.

  He thrust a hand forward, the living blood launching up the stairs, thinning under its own pull before barbed talons slammed into stone above the Cabinet Hall doors.

  He threw his other hand towards the road at his feet, the other end of the line impacted, anchoring to the frozen stones. He held the blood cable tight, then shot up the hill. His handhold ripped upward, like a zipline defying gravity.

  At the top, panicked men chopped at the hooked bloodline with swords, but they might as well have tried cleaving a titanium cable.

  The wide double doors rushed at him, and a bullet ripped through his thigh. Then he was at the top. He released the crimson cord, flying above the doors.

  In the moment he hung in the air, before gravity could rip him down, the blood liquified again, rushing at him, twisting into a dozen razor tendrils. The harpoon tails fused to his back and coiled forward, each seeking a warm target.

  He fell towards the earth, his eldritch appendages attacking the soldiers below him. Each limb, thick as street lamps, darted with individual intelligence, spearing, smashing, and growing.

  Mornsef didn’t leave them to do all the work. He landed on a fleeing soldier, breaking his mortal body with his hands.

  An officer bellowed a challenge, dodging his attack, and charged.

  Mornsef plunged his hand into one of the coils and flung half a dozen crystallized blood darts at the attacker.

  To his credit, the officer took the projectiles with a grunt, covering his face before surging forward and raising his officer’s straight sword.

  Mornsef threw his arm up, siphoning enough blood from the tendrils to form a shield.

  The sword came down, biting into a ruby buckler.

  Mornsef reanimated the shield, encasing the officer’s blade in a scarlet block and crystallizing it.

  The sword jerked from the officer’s hand, dropping as if sealed in cement.

  The officer adapted, whipping out a dagger and thrusting it at Mornsef’s eye.

  The wraith thrust out his hand, blood snaking around his arm and into his palm, forming a crude, dripping blade.

  Mornsef cut, sending the man toppling into two separate pieces.

  Around him, one of the boneless limbs speared one of the final men to the wall, while another engulfed another soldier's head. The man clawed through the tendril and tried to leap free, but it followed, moving with him as he drowned.

  Mornsef waited for the silence, sensing the frantic beating hearts from within the Cabinet hall. He glanced at the bodies, then drew their blood into his raving appendages, feeding them even more.

  Two dozen malignant tendrils wavered from his back. They sloshed and hissed as they darted, seeking warmth, swelling with every attack.

  Mornsef frowned as he stepped over a body and laid his hand flat against the door. He sensed the ten steel bolts that secured it in place. As reliant as he was, his body had limits.

  He glanced at one of the appendages. It turned to him, like a snake, but with a crystalline barb in the place of a face. Mornsef held his arms out, and the blood wrapped around his chest and core, supporting him. The ruby vines fused, merging into four arms, thick as tree trunks.

  Two lashed down, anchoring into stones; two went high, slamming into the oak of the doors. Mornsef grunted, his lean body trembling as he willed solid substance into the arms. They quivered, and the door groaned as it shook.

  He bit down, teeth grinding. His hands thrust into the streams, finding solid handles formed within.

  A groan escaped his lips as his body tensed, the stairs rumbling from the constricting aberration.

  His blood limbs jerked, ten bolds snapping as the door ripped free. He hurled it, giant blood tendrils launching the oversized oak from the hilltop out into the lower city.

  He didn’t watch it impact, but turned his attention to the beating hearts inside.

  Mortals screamed, fleeing. Not guards or soldiers, but retainers and servants.

  Mornself lifted off the ground, hovering into the space astride four massive blood arms like a terrible mount. He launched crystalized darts into the crowd, then targeted a pair of men brandishing pistols with a pair of circular saw blades.

  The legs grabbed and crushed, throwing flailing forms like rats.

  A pair of guards rushed a man towards a back corridor—Magistrate Rovers. Court Atlas had described the man in great detail.

  Mornsef frowned before hurling a massive ruby orb.

  The sphere impacted the doorway, snapping wide and crystallizing to seal it.

  Magistrate Rovers and his guards stumbled, turning in horror as any escape route was instantly cut off.

  Mornsef descended, feet touching the ground, and the four arms split into dozens of smaller chains, lashing out and silencing cries. He didn’t follow any of the details, but strode to his target, blood whipping and hissing around him.

  The guards turned their rifles on him.

  He thrust his hand forward, and two vines redirected, spearing them. He flicked his hand dismissively, and the men were ripped from his path, leaving Rovers cowering in his nightclothes.

  “Please!” the man wailed, raising his arms protectively. “Tell Rahashel that Julleck is of no use now. It’s empty!”

  The final cries went silent behind Mornsef, leaving only the sound of dripping.

  Mornsef frowned. “Rahashel? I don’t serve Rahashel.”

  “Wha—what do you mean?” Rovers whimpered, latching onto the fact that Mornsef was willing to talk, burrowing into the dialogue like a worm into soil.

  “Atlas will dominate all of the Courts,” Mornself said.

  “Listen,” a delirious laugh escaped the magistrate. “I want all of the Courts defeated, too. Maybe this Atlas and I can work together.”

  Mornsef opened a hand. Blood snaked into it, forming a dripping ruby javelin.

  Rover’s gaze fixated on the weapon, and a sob tore from him. “Why do I have to die?”

  The wraith flicked drops from the crystallized blade, and he met the condemned man’s gaze. “Because Jullek is a refugee. And Atlas wants all of the mice running for the same hole.” He speared the magistrate.

  Rovers slumped wordlessly, and Mornself turned.

  Chains, tendrils, and vipers turned to him, waiting for more life to remedy, but he was done here. Mornsef inhaled, holding his hands out. The impossible gallons of gore flooded to him, sliding into his wounds. The volume defied natural law, every drop somehow finding room within the lone man. As he sucked it in, the red color bled back into his hair, and his skin went white.

  At last, he inhaled as the final wisp slid into an open wound, which promptly sealed.

  He glanced down at the wrecked forms, pale and bloodless. He prepared to leave but hesitated. Something about what Rovers had irritated him. Tell Rahashel… Why did everyone assume Rahashel was the only Court interested in Nosmeria?