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sight. The girl could’ve been sent underground again. She should be convalescing, yet Macco the pit boss might’ve ignored Hiresha’s advice.
    Hiresha could not stop to check. She skipped over the banyans of her stronghold, past them, across a jungle basin and into the misty ridges of eroded limestone. Blackness closed in on her vision. Everything flickered; the jungle vanished and became the etched interior of a sarcophagus.
    The other her was waking up.
    Hiresha had another three seconds. She had fallen on a rock formation and broken a rib. Inconsequential. Skimming over a last rock ridge, she fell into a sulcus in the limestone and onto her reliquary.
    The immense geode opened at her touch, and she swung inside. Amethyst crystals enclosed her, each reflecting blue and red from her paragons.
    She fit her red diamond into her engagement necklace. The claw tines cupped the jewel. All was well.
    Hiresha closed her eyes.
    She awoke in another world.

Last breaths sweetened the adobe house. Tethiel stopped before the doorway and inhaled.
    Flies buzzed in celebration. A corpse lay at the threshold, and the ground bore gashes from when the man had tried to claw his way forward on his belly. He had wanted escape, the poor dainty, and he had found the only true one. The rictus of his open mouth revealed teeth sharpened to points. He had been a warrior. He hadn’t stood a chance, not against the Bleeding Maiden.
    Tethiel knew the Feaster was still here. Her scent of rotten roses oozed out of the house. He had to look his best for his would-be rival.
    Daylight stained his coat, but after he stepped into the delicious darkness of the house, the smears vanished. His loose threads knitted together. The gold embroidery rewove through his satin into a dragon nibbling a rosebush. A mist-maiden flower grew from his buttonhole, its five pale petals unfolding. The Bleeding Maiden would have every chance to appreciate it. Nothing spoke louder than subtlety.
    He tied his cravat from shadows. The handkerchief he held in his left hand was a spider web of the finest lace. He tucked terrors up his sleeves. One held an ogre with venomous beer breath and fists ready to express his bruising love to his weeping wife. Up the other cuff lurked the old standby of the abyssal dragon. Tethiel was ready.
    He walked deeper into the house and over the detritus of the living. A rack of drying shoes had tipped over into the hearth embers. Flaccid cactus stems drifted in a pot of soup gone cold. A chicken pecked at a dead man. Above the doorway hung the shriveled umbilical cords of the household’s children. A grand tradition, that.
    One of those children had slumped in a corner. The dead girl wore a rumpled skirt with glyph designs. The doll she gripped had its face painted in angular patterns of orange and red. What a dreadful toy. Tethiel would have to remember it.
    He weathered the thunderbolts of pain from his knee so that he could crouch and wipe the dead girl’s face free of spittle. How tragic to die so young, and how beautiful. She wouldn’t have tasted any of the bitterness of life’s joys.
    The girl’s final fears lingered in the air as an aftertaste of vanilla. Tethiel left her in search of a stronger scent, one of roses. The flowery reek was so powerful he might as well have drowned in petals.
    “They really shouldn’t have let you in,” he said to the Bleeding Maiden, “but there’s nothing so captivating as mortal anguish.”
    She hung against the wall, hair draped over her face. Petite and perilous, she looked less like a woman and more like a figurine of porcelain. The least misfortune would shatter her. And it had. Blood covered her dress.
    An iron spike had been driven through her neck. Another, through her leg. The last, into her heart.
    ‘ The third shall impale the heart, so the Feaster might not live.’ The Bright Palms would’ve cited the tenet while pounding the nail home. They had found this house of death. They had taken