Author's Note: I just wanted to let everyone know that I have a couple of books coming out soon.

  Broken System 3 released yesterday so if you wanted to read something gamelit/ a finished series of mine, now's a great time to do so. The trilogy as a whole is about a thousand pages (270k words), so not super long, but I think it has a very satisfying arc.

  Tenebroum 3 releases 2/24/25. This series is only halfway done, but much better fleshed out, edited, and about 15% longer than the first version I posted. So, if you want to reread and binge some evil, now's your chance! This will eventually be an audiobook (Book 2's audiobook releases in March)

  If you like reading my stories, please consider giving me your support and picking one up.

  It hurt the Voice of Reason to watch the glittering white city of Tanda burn, but safely inside her glittering prison cell, she had no reason to fear. Still, as she watched slender towers topple and gardens burst into fmes, she thought that if she had the option, she would have gdly sacrificed herself to end this.

  It wasn’t just that she abhorred violence where there were other ways to solve conflicts, either. It was that the city had been a work of unparalleled beauty, and she hated to watch it suffer, even from her distant location, somewhere beyond it. From here, she could look up at the night sky and watch the battle very easily.

  Normally, her view consisted of stars that were people’s mps and cookfires. They were predictable lines and consteltions that were shaped by the streets of the city, and she’d grown to appreciate them. Even if the distant view robbed her of all the beautiful details that she knew were there, it let her appreciate the whole thing in a holistic way that might not have been possible otherwise. That was, at least until the sun rose. Then, all those fires were extinguished, and she was alone in the dark with her undead servants until sunset started the cycle anew.

  Tonight, though, the city was burning, and as a result, the skies were on fire, especially on the northeast horizon, farthest from the harbor, where the city wall that was the edge of her world had been partially torn down, and the monster that had done all this damage was coming through.

  The Voice of Reason had no idea why the giant beast was attacking the city. She didn’t know if there had been negotiations or a conversation. No one had told her anything.

  All she knew was that for the st three nights, terrible battles had been waged, and men had died. Even from this distance, she could smell that much death on the wind. Now, though, the city’s vulnerable underbelly was id bare, and it was inside the defenses. It was nothing that she recognized.

  The monster was as big as a house. With words like rat and wolf being thrown around up until now, she hadn’t been sure exactly what she was expecting, but it wasn’t this. This was sure savagery. Men were ripped in half, and other terrible things, though from this distance, she had trouble making out any details. It was visible only by the malevolent glow that came from the consteltions of fire and destruction that surrounded it.

  Once, it looked up past whatever barrier separated them, and she could have sworn that it saw her, even though she was being kept in a prison that didn’t really exist physically. It was a chilling sensation, but soon enough, it was gone because that was the moment that Tanda Nihara chose to take the field.

  The Goddess of the city was not a warrior. She was a merchant and an artist, and when she fought, it was not with her hands but with the walls of the buildings that surrounded the beast.

  Masonry twisted out of pce in a series of avanches that rained tons of brick on the giant chimera. The streets gave way, allowing it to fall into the sewers to be buried alive. Each of these attacks would have murdered any number of mortals, but against this monstrosity, they only slowed it down enough for defenders to regroup. Theirs was a hopeless cause, though, for the thing’s cws were nearly as rge as the scimitars that were wielded against it, and free men, along with eunuch sve warriors, died in droves.

  For a time, the Voice of Reason lost sight of the monster as the destruction continued, and she tracked its progress only by the fires and the lights that went out along its path. When it finally reemerged from the smoke and the dust, it was practically at the pace, but after everything that had been done, it looked only a little worse for the wear.

  The battle that followed there was brief. She’d seen mages fight her dark lord’s forces in the final days of Rahkin, but this was different. Here, the mages didn’t use fire and lightning; they called down shooting stars and vicious bsts of sand. The former stopped the monstrous juggernaut for a time, but the tter made no difference as far as she could tell from this distance.

  It was only then, when there were no other options, that Tanda Nihara fought the thing herself with bdes of crystal and spears of stone. She was outmatched, though. The Voice could see that from the start, in so far as she could see anything from so far away. When the monster sent the stone woman reeling, the Voice’s heart went out to her, but something about the beast's presence made it impossible to cry out.

  Then, just like that, the fight stopped. Suddenly, the chimera had the City’s Goddess on the ground and could have finished her off, but instead, it paused, looking to the south. Then, it turned and started racing back the way it came so quickly that she wasn’t sure what had happened.

  Did she find some threat against it? The Voice of Reason wondered. Is there something that a creature like that actually fears?

  Before she could think too much about that, the Goddess manifested in front of the Voice, phasing out of the wall before colpsing on the ground. She was gravely wounded, with huge cw marks that would have seen her disemboweled if she’d had any internal organs to worry about.

  Instead, she y there weakly as the Voice rushed over to her. “What did you tell it?” she asked. “What did you do to scare that thing away?”

  “Me? Nothing,” Tanda Nihara grunted in pain. “It just found something it wanted more. It will be back to finish the job, but by then I’ll be gone, so it won’t matter. I just wanted to free you first so you could get away before…”

  The Goddess tried to keep going, but the pain took her breath away. For a moment, she just y there struggling to breathe.

  “Shhh,” The Voice of reason whispered, holding the dying Goddess in her arms. “The beast is gone. You may yet recover.”

  “Against that monstrosity? Hardly,” Tanda Nihara gasped. “But that doesn’t matter. As long as Tanda survives, that is all that matters. Where the river meets the sea, there will always be a harbor, and the city that commands it will forever be a jewel.”

  She was hurt badly in her fight with the monstrosity that had torn down her walls. Her marble skin was crumbling, and maggots were squirming in the cw marks that marred her previously pristine body. The Voice was repulsed by them but would not let her die alone. After all, she might not die. Despite what had happened to her, she might yet live. She was a goddess, after all.

  The Goddess of the city stayed there like that, drifting in and out of consciousness while she babbled about her people and how she would rise again. She should survive this, the Voice realized as she looked at the night consteltion, which was the city above them. It is not a mortal wound.

  The fires still burned, but less than before. The city would recover in time, so long as the monstrosity did not return soon. The Walls would be rebuilt, the bck marks would be painted over, and new mosaics and statues would be made to repce the ones that had been shattered. Still, despite that, Tanda Nihara did not wake.

  In fact, a few hours ter, when the lights began to go out, plunging the Voice’s strange oubliette into darkness because the thin light of dawn did not reach here, something bizarre happened. Instead of healing, or even growing still and cold like the statue she appeared to be, the wounded woman simply started to dissolve into sand as the essence of her body was no longer enough to maintain it.

  That on its own would have been odd enough. The Voice of Reason was no true mage, and she could only barely feel the small surge of essence with her dead skin as the stone Goddess drifted away to the ether. Despite that, she was surprised when the dead flesh of the princess she was clothed in began to ossify.

  She stood up, worried she was about to be frozen in pce. She bmed me for this, the Voice thought. Perhaps this is one final punishment. A prison within a prison.

  The idea of being frozen in pce as a statue for eternity in a pocket dimension somewhere beyond the edge of the world was horrifying, but fortunately, that was not what happened. Even as her legs turned to stone, she found that she could bend them and move normally.

  That was a relief, but it was not an answer. Instead, all she could do was watch as the stone slid its way up and down her limbs and wait for whatever was going to happen next. She wasn’t even sure how she’d fight this thing if she wanted to. All she could do was approach one of the many full-length mirrors she kept in the pace, which was her gaudy cell, and watch as it consumed her.

  It was only in the final step, when whatever was happening finally encased her beautiful face in a thin yer of marble, that she finally understood. The Goddess was dead, but the city still had enough strength, thanks to the power of its people, to power the divine, and it had chosen her to wield it.

  Was that simply because she was the most magical being left in the city? Was that because she’d been closest to the old Goddess when she’d passed away? The Voice of Reason had no idea. It might have simply been that she loved it most aesthetically.

  Whatever the case, she was overwhelmed with new information at that moment as she transcended from being the puppet of a dark god into a tiny godling herself. Suddenly, she could feel everything and everyone within her bounds, and she was unsurprised to discover that she liked it.

  A half-dead city needed a new Goddess like her; that only made sense. She would be a good steward, though, and help it to become beautiful once more. As she made that resolution, the gold that held her fractured porcein form together started bleeding through her new stony skin, lending glimmers and streaks of gilded beauty to the whirling patterns of gray that had previously existed within the white marble while she looked on in the mirror.

  A moment ago, she’d looked so simir to the pace walls; now, she was something new. The Voice of Reason pursed her lips for a moment as she watched the gold blossom across her skin before deciding that she liked the change. It was her true nature, after all, and there was no use hiding it. The citizens of Tanda would know soon enough that she’d been reborn.