Calina jerked awake, but she couldn't believe she was no longer dreaming. Her body ached in places she hadn't known existed. The voices continued to throb in her mind. The flames still surrounded her, though now the one to her right shone an ash-like red, the one to her left the purest blackness. From darkness into darkness. The line between nightmare and reality had melted into darkness.

Phantasmagoria.

Calina staggered to her feet, trying to focus. A tiny part of her whispered that something was terribly wrong with her, but there was something else in her head that kept laughing, a ghastly, death-head's laughter that drowned out all other thought. She wanted it to stop--she wanted to get out of here, away from the roiling black hatred in Nickolai's eyes and the vast empty peace in the other man's (his brother's?) face and the awful smug satisfaction of Doctor Ricks. She had never asked for this, for any of it, and that blazing knowledge cleared her vision, gave her the strength to take a few trembling steps toward Ricks.

"That's right, my dear," Ricks crooned. "Savor your anger--conserve it, let it grow. We will have full range of the city soon, so soon, and then you can unleash it. You can scour this place of its filth, the cowardly scum that never deserved to live; once it has been cleansed, we can reign over it in peace, knowing the good we have done for the world."

"Reign?" Nickolai's voice was raw, a crow's croak, before it cracked into the bitterest of laughs. "Is that what it promised you--that you would reign? Over what, exactly, do you plan to reign, Asriel? Fire? Ash? The crumbled ruins of nothing?"

"Silence, brother," Max interrupted, and his movements, his expression, his speech were in monotones--dead, Calina thought contemptuously. Nickolai's eyes were vibrant with pain. The rage--she had never asked for this, for any of it--swelled until she wondered that her body could hold it all.

Max began, "You must trust our Prophet, for he knows--" but he never finished, because a snarl forced itself from deep within Calina's chest and, without warning, she sprang toward Ricks.

The scuffle was short and brutal, and then Calina straightened up over the crooked body of Doctor Ricks, bent inward like a comma, something sharp and bright glinting in her right hand. Both Max and Nickolai stared, startled eyes dark in chalk-white faces, for a long moment; then Max's face contorted and he let out a howl of despair.

Calina's eyes met Nickolai's. "We have to leave," he said, and she nodded.

"What will we do?" she asked, walking over to undo the restraints that kept him trapped on the thin hospital bed.

He opened his mouth to answer, but the words never came. Max's wailing stopped, abruptly, as he slumped over, unconscious; there was a beat of silence; and then it came.

It had slept for centuries, brooding and biding its time, plagued with dark, desolate dreams of a world not yet come into being, a world filled with grey sky, grey dust, grey sand. A world scoured pristine and empty by flame, crumbled to ash, devoid of life. A world in which it could roll itself in the ash of what had been, glutted with death, and be at peace at last.

That day had arrived, that world would be, and it laughed and laughed as it took them in: the dead doctor, that fool who thought he would be rewarded with something other than death, curled on the floor, still and silent; the girl with flint-hard eyes and bloody fingers bending over the man who knew what it truly was, who kept his fists clenched tight with anger at his sides; that man's mirror image, limp and unknowing in the bed beside his brother, who would perish without ever waking up.

And when your fate brings you back to me, it addressed the man named Nickolai, relishing the irony, the recognition in his eyes, I will wage war against you and kill you. And after I've sated my hunger on you and your twin, I will burn this world.

And the world burned.