I suppose someone might've called it art. Strangely, I almost wanted to.

  But see, I am the result of deep seeded self hatred and a short life of difficulty, often catastrophic decisions. The fact that I might appreciate the strange beauty in what I beheld, there in the warm, wet dark of the Sussr Station's ruined lobby, well that's no compliment. If anything, it's a condemnation of myself, and whatever fuckin' monster had created-

  That thing.

  Sculpture? Effigy? Longform exploration of human sufferin' and tragedy through medium of flesh and blood?

  Whatever the hell that was, it had been a man. Judging by the way the eyes immediately leapt to the light that flooded in through the open door, maybe it still was, in part.

  He had been... cast might've been the word. Like hot lead poured into a mold, the man had been plastered to the wall and left to cool, the strange, alien material of the Anasisi biomancers, that black, abyssal sludge. It was strangely uniform, the way it clung, natural and organic, like a second skin that flowed and warped, but didn't quite obscure the human shape within. Said shape was carefully arranged, hands clasped as if in solemn contemplation, legs folded under him in supplication.

  A witness, I thought.

  Much as I just wanted to fix his situation, there was enough humanity in me to know that a mercy bullet would need to wait. Wait until I made sure there was no savin' him, and until I got to know everything useful I could from him.

  "Hey" I said, and the thing twitched and spasmed, "I'm not here to hurt ya', well, no. I will kill you, if you like-"

  The muffled moans that came in response made even the nothing in my gut squirm a little, as if it were at once hungry for, and utterly incensed by the suffering before me.

  "Yeah," I said raisin' the gun, "before I do, anything you can tell me?"

  The thing made a sound, a long low, mournful, wail and then his eyes, wider, wilder, they looked to the stairs that led up, deeper into the station. The mucus-ey black around his mouth stretched and began to tear, causing the rest of the mass that trapped him to shiver and writhe.

  With a pop, maybe just the black tearin', maybe the sound of his jaw dislocatin' or the bone snappin', he freed himself just enough to make two feeble pleas.

  "Don't-" he drew in a short breath, then chocked and gagged on the evil that seemed eager to rush deep into his lungs, "lllooook-"

  Bang.

  The round tore through his skull, a messy hole of gore, for just a moment, then it was filled in with a rush of living darkness.

  Gone. No man left, just that pulsing, writhin' sludge.

  I know we weren't on good terms, me and Divinity. I didn't like them, and they really, really didn't like me.

  But still, I prayed.

  Earnestly, perhaps the first time since I had last followed along with Sarah when she was trainin' to be a Priestess of the Chant. I prayed the Hearthmother would direct her great, fiery eye to this corner of putrid dark, prayed she'd bless the flames I'd set, when all was done.

  And then, with my heart heavy, and my soul sick, I took a step further into the dark of the Sussr station.

  I had only the red magelight with me. Couldn've taken one of the others, something bright, but I didn't really needed it. Arcane Soul and the Wyld mana everywhere outside sharpened my mundane senses to a razor's edge. I could've spotted a crag elk a half mile out on a moonless night by then.

  Which meant, ain't none of what was on the second floor stayed hidden to me.

  More, more witnesses, each of them position in their own places of torturous vigil upon the ceiling. Their eyes fixed on me, the pleas unspoken, but not unheard. They had been the men and women that ran the station, or so Cordileone had said. Probably good folk, university mages, smart gals looking to avoid work on the streets or in the brothels, young men trying to prove themselves to whoever they thought mattered.

  Just people, once. Now they were only the husks and shadows of people. Their minds were lost to madness and their bodies consumed. What remained was a mockery, a twisted reminder, a-

  Witness.

  That word came again, whispered in my own voice unbidden. They were meant to see what I had, when I had strong armed my Patron into meetin' the boss lady. They were meant to peer into that empty, fathomless ocean, see the teeth, see the eyes, I think. The fact that they were bound in seeming prayer?

  That proved to me my encounter with the Lady of the Deep wasn't wholly unique. Maybe she had been their god, the Anasisi. Maybe she had been the thing to speak to me when I destroyed that dark dragon's heart.

  There were a lot of fuckin' maybes.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  I didn't need them just then. I killed everyone on the second floor, and then the third. I blinded those terrified eyes forever, spared them the sight of whatever horror had made them.

  As I rounded the stairs to the fourth and final floor, I expected I would soon witness it myself.

  Good.

  Whatever it was, it would be a real pleasure to blow it's fuckin' head off.

  A tentacle reached into my back and drew out a brace of blood red forty caliber shells. I'd rather have had my scattergun, gone up with Scaras made sanctified rounds, but I was out of those, my trusty gun lost in some alley deeper in this cursed town.

  Instead I'd have to trust in Gore Arsenal, in the gift of nothing that blessed my self-made shots to be almost as wicked as all I had seen.

  I crept up the stairs, my footsteps inaudible, magelight affixed to my breast like a badge, casting deep red light into the midst of spidery shadows. The bars, the wires and such, they played with the light in a funny way, it was like a spider's web, like I was stalkin' into the nest of a great, bloodthirsty predator.

  The air was warmer here, and the smell, salt, rendered fat, all of it damp and fecund. The faint sound of wet drippin' of tainted water churning in a once stagnant hole. I recalled the cenote below Hightown, and the comparison couldn't have been more apt.

  As I reached the top of the stairs my red light met a soft blue, and they mixed in the lingerin' ripple of torn space that occupied the bulk of the fourth floor. This is where the real magic was worked, I thought as I looked away from the madness inducing tear in the fabric of mortal beings. The rest was decoration. Up here, that's where he made the shrine.

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  The blinkin' light was comin' from some magitech console, all brass and iron and mage crystal. It at the far end, a half circle shape around the stairs, dominating three of the four walls.

  That was the actual Sussr Array, I guessed. There was indeed a large, blue crystal, and a strange bundle of wires on a stick that I guessed was what you talked into.

  I'd have loved to just run over there scream a message out to the Guild or Empire, or, fuckin' anyone with artillery mages and a penchant for widespread destruction. But uh...

  There was a problem.

  I looked up at it, slowly, the Kraken's vague message firmly lodge in my mind.

  Don't look it in the eyes.

  Well, that was sound advice. But there a whole lot of them, weren't there? Black and glassy, just like the pearl of nothing in my own guts, I expect. They tracked my light, sought my own eyes as I tried to take in as much of their shape, the shrine's shape, as I could.

  I counted legs, since those were easiest to identify amongst the twisted mass of torture, and spent humanity.

  Eighteen. That was nine people, near as I could tell. Eight people, not plastered and cast as the witnesses had been, but stacked, bound together with that same evil shit, but with an eye, many eyes, for structure. The build, four on the bottom, three next, two above, and one at the crown of it all.

  A pyramid, I supposed. Those on the base, their legs were folded at unnatural angles, the joints not broken, but repurposed into a mockery of a serpent's tail. Their arms, they were raised in an 'X' shape, crossbar support for the tier above them, and the tier above that. Only the woman at the top, her face partially uncovered by the black sludge, was afforded any measure of comfort, in exchange for violation so complete...

  Her arms were stretched to a cruel length, her wrists and shoulders merged with the brows of her fellows below as they stared emptily up at her. Their faces were buried in the flesh of her thighs, as if they rested there, in the comfort of a mother.

  Her stomach was, swollen.

  I couldn't decide what was worse. That she had been with child before that monster of a mage found her, or that she hadn't.

  Then, her face. It wasn't blank pain or abject misery like those of all the others.

  No.

  It was serene. Rapturous, almost. The same expression of quiet wonder, of benevolent goodness, that Temperance wore to hide her true, cunning nature.

  It was the look of a Saint. One made by the hands of man, to honor a thing which spurned the very notion. She told me that, the Lady, in whisper on the dark currents of churning entropic mana that drowned the hole scene.

  I do not suffer mortal worship. They take my image.

  Take. It. Back.

  I raised my guns, and whispered to the thing, the people, this false Saint born of mad biomancy and an obsession with a god not meant for those of us who walked the land, who dwelt in light, "I am so sorry." I said, my voice breakin' on the last, "I am so, fuckin' sorry."

  The false Saint stared back, her dark eyes wide, unblinking, adoring. Her mouth was covered in sludge, and I was thankful. There was nothin' I had that could save them, and the thought of her speakin', of her voice-

  The strange bundle of wires, the speakin' box of the Sussr Station, it crackled to life, and the moment I did, I made terrible mistake.

  My eye flicked to its perch just near the center of the pyramid, and there, where the little blue light had been, stared back a single, glowing eye.

  I froze, solid as ice.

  "There is no need to feel sorrow, Lorcan Roche." Called a thousand weeping voices, drowned and distorted by the weight of countless oceans, "We have all been blessed to witness. You, first among us," sang the chorus as the music, her music, rose from the Sussr Station's speakers, "have been given the most sacred task of any, and the deepest honor." They said, as the Saint's stomach convulsed, motion beneath the oil black flesh, "She does not know she hungers for it, but we know we must bring Our Lady- To. This. World."

  I felt it, the pressure in my mind. A terrible force of will, crushing beyond crushing. It was like the nothing in me, had been inverted, absence became creation, and that bottomless hole turned outwards. The world around me, the walls, the ceiling, the air itself.

  As the tear in reality expanded, yawned so wide I could clear into the abyss, see mountainous teeth and star-sky eyes of my Patron's Patron, all the world was pulled in towards me. My mind, the meat, the grey matter. I was being crushed. Squeezed to pulp, by an unseen hand of impossible might.

  Then she popped. Like a rotten tomato, and the force blew me off my feet.

  All at once, the pyramid and the false saint at it's peak exploded in viscera, the pressure in my mind vanishing as I was spattered in hot, stinging gore and blood. It burned and ate at as much of me as it could, tried to burrow past the wounds it made, tried to find shelter in the rich red muscle and flesh...

  And it died for the attempt. My tentacles, instinctive and clever in their strange, alien way, immediately moved to grab and drink up the evil slurry. I felt it, in the empty inside me, a sudden, searing heat of violence and hunger, it screamed as it yawned to take back all that it could.

  And that scream? Something impossible.

  Through whatever terrible, eldritch link I had inflicted upon myself when I traded my nothing, for hers, I felt... Fear.

  A fear of being manifested. Bound. Contained with in the limited laws of a mortal and material realm. For a being of true infinity, of absolute entropy, that was a fate worse than death.

  What sin had I done, what blasphemy had led me to a fate like this? I knew I was a piece of shit, most of the time, but was that really bad enough to justify what I had to know?

  What I had just witnessed?

  The answer to my unspoken question came, as the remains of the false saint's and her altar ran down the wall in a wave of gore that settled into an unnatural puddle that surround me where I lay flat.

  Before I could stand, aim pistol packed full of my own strange ammunition, the dark water receded drank in at a point just below where the outlines of tortured men still stained the walls and floors. The dark slurry rippled, shuddered and then rose into a new shape.

  A familiar one, born of a nightmare I had had just a night ago.

  Her skin was as pale as bleached coral, her hair thick bounds locks of writhing eels. Her eyes, windows into the dark deep of the grandest ocean. Her shape was feminine, the curves of her figure as inviting as a siren's song and just as wicked.

  Before me stood a manifestation, an avatar of my Patron's Patron. The Lady of the Deep, the thing that ate all the others of monsters and made herself a Queen in the endless dark.

  She was naked, her flesh smooth and unblemished.

  Her face contorted, after a moment of stunned and silent contemplation on both of our parts. It twisted with rage, the kind of anger that could only come from a being that had only ever known its own whimsy, its own will, to find itself at the mercy of a lesser, an inferior existence.

  She screamed. Whalesong and the calls of leviathans. Sea birds and the rush of wind through salt crusted stone. The crash of a rolling wake and the shift of stone beneath deep, deep water.

  If I wasn't already thoroughly fucked up by everything I had seen so far, I might've gone truly mad, right then.

  For better or worse though, I was pretty well inoculated against madness. I knew it, when it screamed at me, and I knew when to pull the trigger. I brought both guns up, my tentacles almost eager to obey my command. I didn't think, just reacted. A quick, double tap, and-

  "Stop!" she snarled, black eyes boring into mine, "fool mortal you cannot return my avatar by killing it-"

  Bang. Bang.

  Both rounds struck true, punched holes in her center mass, a pair of shots that'd stop a troll in it's tracks. As they did her, just for a moment, and she gasped as she felt, perhaps for the first time, a real pain. Then the real power of my Gore made rounds manifested.

  Those jellies, the little spirits I so often saw in the sea beyond the mortal realm, in that space between where spirits lingered and cosmic forces watched, they came.

  A swarm, a thousand tiny, boneless and glowing bodies shot from the ether all around to cling to her flesh, to her spirit and being. They latched on and bit, injected venom, acid, and began to burn and dissolve the avatar of the ancient, alien god. She screamed again, in agony and terror. She flailed and thrashed and fought. But still, this fragment of my Patron's Patron, she persisted.

  Boom. Boom.

  Two more, then I had to reload, quick as a hare with a hound dog on his heels. I thumbed shells into the breach, and before she could regain her footing I fired two more shots to the chest. This time, the jelly spirits had an edge, and she was brought to her knees by the onslaught.

  It was during the second reload, as two spare arms burrowed in my own flesh to withdraw another brace of Gore Arsenal rounds, that something shifted. A flicker of reality all around. The space around me, after that ritual, that unholy construction had been torn from existence, it was fragile, brittle like sea glass, and now I saw a thousand spiderweb cracks.

  Before I could even think to run, it shattered and reality fell away.