It was like whirling down a drain.

The suction sent everyone and everything hurtling through the labyrinth of Imperial hallways that filled the space where the outdoors should have been. Everything spun. Walls and furniture battered Merritt, paintings, wallpaper, tables, and chairs flying past in a repeating scroll like in a video game gone mad. Walls cracked and caved in as they bashed against the other wyrms.

Storn yelled. "Merritt!"

Clenching her claws, Merritt swirled levitation around herself and flooded power into the weaves. Everyone else did the same. Their magic managed to slow them down, but at the cost of slamming them into the ceiling.

Inside her mind, Storn held her hand. He squeezed it tightly.

Merritt scrambled to understand what was happening. The answer came to her as she looked around.

For some reason, there was no gravity anymore. The force that held all things to the earth was simply gone. Objects floated freely; orchids, tables, and paintings came unmoored from the walls. Crumpled carpets took flight. Spinning tea sets drifted slowly through space.

Brand was the first to figure it out. Merritt watched him delete the part of the levitation meant to counteract the ground's pull. A moment later, he floated away from the ceiling.

Merritt did the same, willing away the same threads from the same places in her own weave. The force pressing her against the ceiling relented.

Everyone bobbed midair, long, flailing bodies colliding as they drifted about. It was very awkward. Everyone tried to get away, tails and claws smacking into snouts and manes.

Yuth snorted. "What the hell is going on?!"

Nurse Costran's song sounded different. Merritt easily noticed it, and knew she couldn't have been the only one who had. It was… thinner, and far softer than it should have been. Unbound by gravity, their spores moved like ink in water, making beautiful eddies.

Merritt sunk her claws into the corner of a corridor and pulled herself around the bend. It was like climbing out of a swimming pool.

Up and down had lost their meaning. Only the hallways remembered, with the light fixtures on the ceiling and the floor's marble.

The group untangled in short order. Wyrms darted down hallways and around corners in a desperate search for an exit—any exit.

Paul cried. "We're trapped!"

"Dammit, man!" Heggy said, glaring at Nathan, while floating at Brand's side. "This is all your fault."

"Enough!" Geoffrey said. The ancient spirit hovered by Karl's flank. "Assign blame later. For now, we should go back the way we came. That's the simplest escape route." He spoke in a calm, commanding voice, even as a teapot phased through his chest.

Nodding, Nathan shoved off a wall and floated ahead.

Heggy flipped him off as he passed her by.

Merritt craned her neck to look around the corner.

Jonan yelled. "What is that!?"

The wyrms recoiled as one, and then screamed.

Geoffrey made the Bond-Sign. "Angel preserve us!"

Half of a man had just phased out of the corridor wall, ripe in middle age. He wore antique military dress: a double-breasted red suit covered in medals and commendations, with golden epaulets on his broad shoulders, and an officer's cap covering his messy brown curls.

That was the left half of his body. The right half was a silhouette of perfect darkness, as ragged as the prismatic flames that spewed from the man's eye sockets. The darkness spread across his torso like a stain, and its boundary burned in that same, many-colored fire.

Merritt's memories told her who he was. "Emperor Eustin?!" she said, crying out in disbelief.

"Fuck the Empire!" Jonan barked.

The Emperor didn't like that. His shadow arm lengthened and thinned as he pulled it back. His hand's ragged outline thickened, sharpening into a flame-wrapped blade. He lunged at Nathan and the others with a scream.

"Demons! Demons!"

Eustin's voice made Merritt's mane shiver. Plumes of air brushed her snout as the shadow Emperor's words passed her by.

Valentine yelled. "Look out!"

Power briefly swirled around the wyrm before he bravely launched himself at the corrupted Emperor. Valentine split his thrust-weave in half, willing each half into one of his hands and then repurposing it into double force blasts that he slammed into the shadow's incoming arm.

Merritt watched helplessly as the Emperor's shadow-blade arm cut through Valentine's magic, slicing the blue and gold threads to pieces. The fragments whirled around the shadow and disappeared into its darkness. Karl fired off an attack of his own while Brand tried to pull Valentine back with his psychokinesis, but the Emperor cut through it all with a single swing.

Valentine screamed as the shadow-blade sliced him in half. Either side of the wound ignited in prismatic fire. The wyrm's body twitched as it floated apart, his flesh shriveling and grayed, as if he was drying up.

"Run, Merritt!" Storn yelled. "Run!!"

The wyrms turned tail and flew, racing down the corridors. Merritt pushed off the wall, slamming her flank against the opposite side of the hallway as she turned around.

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The shadow Emperor gave chase. He flew through the air with his sword arm outstretched, trailing a lineage of afterimages as he screamed and screamed.

— — —

Ibrahim watched Valentine's body break down. It was melting apart midair.

He blamed himself for that. He blamed himself for all of this. He was terrified of his guilt and guilty of terror—but that didn't mean he was useless. He knew was already living on borrowed time.

Perhaps I always had been, he thought.

But right now, no one was better positioned to go mano a mano with this bastard than he was.

"Run!" he yelled. "Run!"

Ibrahim whipped his body around, flicking nearby wyrms away.

Karl cried out. "Dr. Rathpalla!"

He was a good kid. He deserved to survive.

Ibrahim shoved Karl away with a yell. "Go!"

The push sent Karl drifting down the hallway behind Ibrahim, toward Dr. Nowston. At the same time, Dr. Rathpalla cast a long plexus line at the Emperor.

He was not about to let the shadow monster carve up Merritt Elbock like a squash.

The spell spooled out like a fishing line. Wrapping it around the apparition's one solid leg, Ibrahim grabbed the thread with his hands and his mind and pulled, right as he flooded it with power. The spirit thrashed, dragging Ibrahim forward, but Dr. Rathpalla redoubled his efforts and won the tug of war, arms and thoughts pulling in swiftly, and the long-dead Emperor hurtling toward him, back first.

Dr. Rathpalla sprang forward, claws at the ready, pushing off the wall and ceiling with two different points of his body. He sliced into the Emperor's back as effortlessly as the Emperor had cut Valentine in two, ripping the shadow's meatier half into jagged pieces. The Emperor's body was more substantial than Ibrahim thought it would be.

It felt like a real body, even as burning fluid poured out from the wounds.

The shimmering liquid boiled in the air as it floated this way and that.

Suddenly, shadowstuff shot out from the breaks in the Emperor's body, spanning the wounds from one end to the other, seeping into them like mortar. The spirit blurred in Ibrahim's hands, and then vanished, only to reappear right behind him, but Ibrahim's rearmost eyes saw the Emperor coming, which gave him just enough time to turn around and pull away as the shadow swung his shadowfire arm-blade in a long, downward slash.

He'd dodged enough of the shadowfire, but not all of it. His underbelly burned where the tip of the Emperor's weapon had nicked him.

Ibrahim screamed, spraying spores in every direction.

The shadow Emperor flickered again, this time reappearing several feet to the rear. Then lunged in for another strike. Ibrahim lurched backward while raising a psychokinetic shield, just in case—

"—Shit!"

The weapon sliced his protective forcefield to ribbons. Energies frayed like cut hair.

Ibrahim shoved himself off the wall at his left and flew along the opposite wall, rocketing past the Emperor and toward the corner up ahead. Thrusting the lower half of his body forward, Ibrahim coiled his tail right as it touched the far wall, with the Emperor still hurtling toward him. Then he sprung up, flying back the way he came.

He attacked the shadow from behind.

It hadn't escaped Ibrahim's notice that his blow to the Emperor's human side had done little more than slow the monster down, but that was good enough for him. He could worry about defeating it once he'd distracted it long enough for the others to get away.

Unfortunately, that's when things decided to get worse.

Screams broke out elsewhere in the impossible labyrinth. Ibrahim could make out sheets of pataphysics flashing in the distance like bombs.

"No!" he yelled.

He slammed his tail into the Emperor's shadow side. The brief contact was hot and cold agony that sparked up and down Ibrahim's spine. It made him think his eyes were about to explode.

He pushed off the wall and shot forward, racing toward the sounds of combat.

— — —

The group had scattered, just as the doctor had ordered. Nurse Costran had fled, taking Mrs. Elbock with her. Brand followed a short way behind them, along with Karl and Nathan. Then, after just two-and-a-half lengths of hallway, more monsters came out of the woodwork.

The scientific parts of Brand's mind really, really wanted to know how they did that.

He and Karl had yelled: "Mrs. Elbock, run!"

Brand drifted back in horror as two apparitions emerged from the walls, one from either side. Most of their bodies were being consumed by fiery shadows that gleamed like oil slick on water. Just like the Emperor, their eye sockets flared in many colors burned in their eye sockets. The larger of the two shadows wore a white suit that even Brand could tell was centuries out of style. The other was an Archluminer, clad in a bluejay robe. The shadow consuming the Archluminer's body had stained the robe with void, while the man in white had no face, just a memento more of eyes of fire gleaming in his head of writhing shadow.

The corruption on their bodies extruded into twisted blades. Afterimages echoed in their wake.

Karl yelled. "Dr. Nowston!" Pushing off the hallway's wall, Karl turned around and poured two furious plexal spirals into the space between himself and the ghosts. The walls cracked and expanded, overstuffed with power as the magic puréed the apparitions' uncorrupted parts.

Brand had difficulty believing what Dr. Rathpalla had told him about Karl. If there was still a frightened, helpless kid in that wyrm, he was nowhere to be found.

But, bravery was no guarantor of victory.

The mist of blood and sinew ignited in prismatic fire, swirling into pulsing motes. The shadows flew through the flames, toward Karl, indifferent to the damage Karl had inflicted.

"Let's keep pounding them!" Brand yelled.

Karl nodded.

Brand joined the young wyrm, lobbing attack after attack at the two spirits. They lashed them with psychic whips, blasted their faces with forcefields, and heaved great orbs of deranged pressure and gravity.

The air filled with chips of broken architecture.

But the shadows and their fire cut through it all, like the Lass parting the sea. Pulsing, plexal forests flashed, broke, and died as the shadow blades effortlessly sliced through. The viscera of Ibrahim's attacks bashed down walls and ripped through furniture in the last seconds before they dissipated.

When the two shadows came into view, they looked like clumps of clouds of cloth and flesh tenuously kept together by bonds of darkness and prismatic fire.

The spirits lunged forward with broad, sweeping strikes.

"Come and get me, you bastards!"

Brand snapped his head back toward Dr. Rathpalla's yell.

The psychiatric wyrm hurtled the corridor at blinding speed, enshrouded in a supercharged levitation plexus. Ibrahim's claws blurred as he waved. "Out of the way!"

Brand grabbed Nathan and Karl by the arm and flew up through the debris cloud. One of the shadows' cut through the last third of Nathan's tail, who so strongly thrashed with agony that he ripped himself out of Brand's grip. Brand started to double back, but a wave of force expanding from below slammed into him and knocked him up and back and up, shoving his horns and mane into Karl's underbelly. Momentum carried them higher still, crashing them into the oncoming ceiling, which they pushed off as they regained flight control, though Brand nearly lost his all over again as he slowed time and looked around.

For a second, he thought something was wrong with his eyes, and then realized there wasn't, and then wished there was.

Mirrors.

When mirrors reflected mirrors, they reflected each other's reflections, over and over again, creating an illusion of infinite recursion through a trick of light. You'd see the same scenes repeated within themselves, at smaller and smaller scales.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, everywhere, everywhere.

That was the only way Brand could make sense of what he saw through the hole in the corridor's ceiling: another corridor with a hole in its ceiling, and another corridor beyond that, again and again. Copies of corridors blended into one another through the breaks in the walls, and when Brand looked through the holes, he saw Karl and himself looking back.

Clouds of debris blasted out of the way as multiple copies of the shadow-Emperor soared up at the two wyrms, all their shadow fire sword-arms pulled back, ready to strike.

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