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sacrifice, and place such a stain upon the collective conscience of Humanity?”
    “We can do this; we must do this,” said the Lady Shard, who represented Duty. Vivacious, she was, full of life, and deadly in her focused malice. “We will do this because we have no other choice. Humanity will be saved, and avenged, and that is all that matters.”
    And so the decision was made, and the order given. The Lord Ravensguard and the Ladies Subtle and Shard went out from Convocation to cross the world and acquire the three necessary elements for Humanity’s last blow at the Medusae.
    The Lord Ravensguard went to the Grand Old Opera House, set among the gleaming spires and shimmering towers of the city Sydney, in Australia. Samuel DeClare was singing there that night. There was no greater singer among all Humanity at that time. They called him the Man With the Golden Voice. When he sang, everyone listened. He could break your heart and mend it, all in a single song. Make you cry and make you cheer; weigh you down and lift you up; and make you love every moment of it. His audiences adored him, and beat their hands bloody in applause at the end of every concert. And this night was his greatest appearance, before his biggest audience. Afterwards, everyone there said it was his finest moment. They were wrong, but they couldn’t know that. The Lord Ravensguard stood at the very back of the massive concert hall, and listened, and was moved like everyone else. Perhaps more so, because he alone knew what Samuel DeClare’s final performance would entail.
    He went backstage to meet with DeClare after the concert was over. The greatest singer of all time sat slumped, unseeing, before his dressing-room mirror, surrounded by flowers and gifts, and messages of congratulation from everyone who mattered. He was big and broad-shouldered, and classically handsome, like some god of ancient times come down to walk among his worshippers. He sat slumped in his chair, tired, depressed, lost. He could barely find the energy to bow his head respectfully to the Lord Ravensguard.
    “What is wrong?” said the Lord. “Your audience loved you. Listen; they’re still cheering, still applauding. You sang magnificently.”
    “Yes,” said DeClare. “But how can I ever follow that? There will be other songs, other performances, but nothing to match tonight. It hits hard, to reach the peak of your career and know there’s nowhere left to go, but down.”
    “Ah,” said the Lord Ravensguard. “But what if I were to offer you the chance for an even greater performance? One last song, of magnificent scope and consequence, before an audience greater than any singer has ever known?”
    DeClare raised his heavy head, and looked at the Lord Ravensguard. “How long would this performance last?”
    “Just the one song,” said the Lord Ravensguard. Because he was allowed, and even encouraged, to lie when necessary.
    The Lady Subtle went to meet the infamous Weeping Woman in that most ancient of prisons, the Blue Vaults. That wasn’t her real name, of course. She was Christina Valdez, just another face in the crowd, until she did what she did, and the media called her La Llorona, the Weeping Woman. The authorities put her in the Blue Vaults for the murder of many children. She wept endlessly because she had lost her own children in an awful accident, which might or might not have been of her own making. And then she went out into the night, every night, drifting through the back streets of dimly lit cities, to abduct the children of others, to compensate her for her loss. None of these children ever went home again.
    The Lady Subtle went down into the Blue Vaults, those great stone caverns set deep and deep under the Sahara Desert, and there she gave orders that one particular door be opened. Inside, Christina Valdez crouched naked in the small stone cell, covered in her own filth, blinking dazedly into the sudden and unexpected light. Because normally, when