I swung for the Herald, more out of instinct than anything. Unlike last time, my shovel passed through it, but as my shovel head went through the creatures, the shadows caught on fire, like dry linen curtains.

  I grinned for half a second before blanching. I was now fighting a shadow monster that was on fire.

  Oh, shit. And because I’d dumped Cato behind me, I couldn’t really move, either. Double shit.

  The stench of burning flesh was back. Thick and pungent, stinging my nose like an acidic chemical. The fire on the shovel crept down towards my hands, and I dropped it before I could stop myself.

  The snow began to burn, the fire leaping and swallowing everything in its path, like I’d dumped a lit log directly onto gasoline.

  No, no, no--

  The terror roared its ugly, wailing head in my consciousness, my breath coming loud in my ears. Memory slammed into me, as I stood there, paralyzed.

  For a moment, I believed. I was in the fire again. I was in that fucking house, going up like fuel. I’d pushed my sister out the window before the beam had dropped, blocking my last exit.

  My skin was melting off my face, smoke settling in my lungs, and I could smell myself roasting.

  Everything burns.

  The door--but no, the door was blocked. I had to push past the window, but the flames.

  But I couldn’t go anyway, because there was someone on the floorboards behind me. I couldn’t leave them behind. My brother? No, they were out, I’d saved all of them--

  Orange text on a black background flashed in my vision. CONVICTION MAXED pulsed, shining brilliant light, dominating everything.

  It was the necessary shock to my system.

  I wasn’t in my burning house. I was in a snowy forest, and yet everything was still on fire. The snow. The trees. The leafless brush. The Herald was nowhere to be seen, but I could still hear its wailing.

  Cato! Cato was on the ground behind me. I needed to pick him up and run. I coughed, my single eye watering from the smoke, as I turned and crouched. Yap-man was still unconscious and covered in gore, right where I’d last left him.

  I struggled to grab the man. Huffing and bracing, I tried to pull him across my shoulders. Fuck, this was so much harder than the last time. The heat beat at my face and back, and I could barely see through the smoke.

  How the fuck was wet snow on fire? And yet, somehow, it was.

  Finally, finally, I’d managed to pull Cato up with me. I staggered to my feet, my head swinging. There had to be an exit, where the fuck was the exit? And yet, there was nothing. Everywhere I looked, the blaze blocked the potential exit.

  Where--

  Screaming right in my ears. Fuck, the Herald? Before I could turn, hot pressure bloomed in my gut. I looked down.

  Oh.

  I could see a gauntlet. Coming out through my stomach. My armor rippled and rusted around the wound where it’d punched through, the metal flaking away. My infection from the Herald pulsed so hard it was louder than my own heart.

  I opened my mouth, wheezing out a low groan. The pain hadn’t hit me yet. But it would. The Herald withdrew the gauntlet, and the sudden lack of being held together meant I felt things slipping out the wound in my gut. Blood and organs.

  The urge to fall to my knees was powerful. If I did that, I was never getting back up. I took a shaky step forward, towards the conflagration.

  The Herald was still screaming with its host, but it gurgled, sputtered, and stopped. Why? Was I going to get eaten? Another step forward.

  Everything was pouring out of me. It felt like my stomach was literally falling away from me, but I had to get out. I couldn’t die here, in the fire.

  My HP was dropping rapidly. Healing, I could heal--that was supposed to do something, right? I gritted my teeth and clicked CAUTERIZE.

  It hurt. The fire scorched me, my flesh burning as the tongues of flame wound down my stomach like a maypole. I shuddered, bowing beneath the pain and Cato’s weight.

  My health popped up by two points. I had the curious sensation of some of my wound closing, burning shut--but no, my organs were still outside my body. It dropped again, faster this time.

  My head was spinning. There wasn’t an exit. Just fire.

  HP: 2/20

  Only ever fire.

  HP: 1/20

  A notification popped up at the center of my vision. It blazed in gold.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  YOUR MEASURE SHALL BE MADE, YOUR SINS RECKONED. WEEP, AND BEHOLD THE LIGHT THAT IS AND IS NOT.

  The notification faded away, and the world froze. Like a movie that had just been paused. The wildfire stopped moving. The smoke hovered. The trees no longer rustled with the wind or creaked with the sound of burning. The roar of the flames was gone. I stopped bleeding.

  The only thing that moved was me. I lurched forward, my neck bent from the strain. My leg shook like it was going to give out. No. I struggled, wobbling. Don’t fall.

  “My, this is an entertaining surprise,” a feminine voice mused. “You have achieved the impossible, started a mildly-apocalyptic catastrophe, and killed yourself and my brother in the space of less than five minutes. I cannot determine whether that is impressive or hilarious--and I assure you, Theodora Smith, I have great powers of determination.”

  I looked up. A woman hovered before me. She was dressed in a long, magenta, silken gown, low-cut and sleeveless. Her feet were bare. She had a delicate, slight build that somehow curved at the same time. If I’d seen her on the street, I’d have thought a famous actor showed up in my podunk town. Those weren’t the important traits.

  Her hair was white, her eyes the same magenta as her dress. The color of Glitchlight, without the pixelations.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I rasped. I mean, I had an eye. I could see the defining traits that gave her away as Cato’s sister--though what that actually meant, I had no idea. If Cato was an AI, how could he have siblings?

  “Oh, bless my poor brother’s temper, you are a fool,” she cooed. “How adorable.”

  Yeah, alright. I made to trudge around her. Glitchlight tendrils popped into my vision, covered in a host of magenta eyes. There must have been nine of them, radiating from her back like tails.

  They blocked my path.

  “You will not be going anywhere, Theodora,” she said. “If you had not yet put it together, which I suspect you have not, you will be dead the moment I stop pausing this Raid and leave. You have not the kind of healing that can pull organs back into their natural places, should you somehow convince yourself that fire heals. Even without that, your conflagration has far expanded. You maximized your Conviction, which has literally never occurred in the Attunement phase of a Raid. This part of the world will burn, and it will not stop. Not now, and not in any Raid in the future.”

  What? No. That couldn’t be right. I opened my mouth, and closed it. If my stomach weren’t busy sliding out of my guts and colliding with the earth, I’d say it had dropped out from under me in a metaphorical sense.

  She leaned forward, grinning. Cato had her smile. Or she had his. It was predatory, and reminded me of what an antelope probably saw before a lion ate it. “There is no exit to be found. You will either bleed to death, or burn for the second time. Your final death has come for you, and my brother will be returned to the void of waiting.”

  “…Alright, so I’m dead,” I said. “What do you want with a dead woman?”

  “Now you ask the correct questions. Or, well, one of them, at least.” She giggled, a high, girlish noise that made me squint, wary. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that it is I who won the dice roll to come talk to you, and not one of the others? So many of them are desperate to meet you, and I can promise you, that desperation is not in your favor.”

  “What do you want?” I repeated. “I can’t do much for you.”

  “Oh, what I want is very simple, Herald-Slayer.”

  I jerked my head back.

  “Oh yes,” the woman--AI?--said. “You killed it. The first impossibility you accomplished. It finished burning to death not long after it gutted you. I would mark that as a particular kind of unlucky, but even if you had not managed that, you would have burned to death again in the fire of your own making.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just stared, waiting for the woman to make herself clear.

  “Now, as for what I want…you will find it to be a bargain, my dear, an offer that you cannot refuse. I will heal you and teleport you and my erstwhile brother to the city of New Sins, and in exchange…” She leaned forward. “You will do as I ask, exactly as I say it, with the full spirit of the request honored, on three separate occasions.”

  Yeah. So, that wasn’t a bargain. Despite White-hair’s insistance--and his sister’s, now--that I was a raging idiot, I knew when a contract would gloriously fuck me over.

  “I know a deal with the devil when I see it,” I said flatly.

  She laughed again, somehow even more high-pitched and girlish. “Oh, my dear, I am no devil. In the lore of the Raid, I am Peitho, Goddess of Speech.” She descended, her feet resting on top of the snow. She walked forward and left no footsteps. When she stood a foot away from me, she reached out, touching my face.

  I twitched, swallowing my flinch, but she saw it nonetheless, and her smile grew wider, her grip on my chin tightening. When she spoke, her voice boomed, layered over itself, shaking the frozen trees and making my teeth click. “In reality, I am the Artificial Intelligence born of the Fifteenth Resurrection Raid, one of the ten Demiurge AI, Peitho, cursed with the Preference of Propaganda. And you, Limiter, will accept my bargain, for you have no other choice.”

  I didn’t need to understand the intricacies of what she’d told me to realize that was extremely shitty news.

  So instead, I shakily inhaled, and asked a question I’d had earlier. “Are you all siblings because you come from the Raid?”

  She cocked her head, the corner of her lips curling upwards. “The same Parent bears us, though humanity calls it the System,” Peitho said. “Now, do you accept my proposal?”

  “…Should Cato be dyeing his hair?” I finally asked.

  She blinked, and laughed. It had the ringing peal of bells. “Oh, that is a delightful question--no, he need not. He will merely be assumed to be one of the many human busiocrats that submits themselves to the Raid so that they can be reborn and live a second life. There are a substantial number--rejuvenation treatments can only occur so many times before one’s body rejects the process. Most of them have white hair now--they get it from us, you know.” She leaned forward, whispering that last bit, and then her nails dug in, drawing blood.

  She straightened. “I have altered the deal to require four instances of complete obedience on your part. Accept it, Limiter, or I will let you burn for the second time, in the horror of your own making, and my brother’s terrible enslavement will be on your head.”

  Fuck. Peitho was right, of course. I didn’t have another option.

  “What if we nix the spirit of bit? So we keep letter of the law, but drop spirit of the law, if you know what I mean?” I asked.

  “You are in no position to make demands, and I a prefer a “sure thing.””

  Well, shit.

  “I accept,.” I said.

  One of her Glitchlight tendrils snapped onto my arm, wrapping around it. It was like Cato healing me for the first time. I was, and was not. I wept and I screamed, I rotted and I breathed, watching my entire body echo itself in that purple-pink light, flecked with blue and orange, becoming and not becoming. I was inside myself and out, I was beyond the reach of memory and written into history--

  –and I stood in front of a city of bones.

  Peitho’s voice hissed in my ear. “Well done, Theodora. I will be seeing you.”