Kill Six Billion Demons (book one): part 2
Okay! Sixty-some pages of this very dense and overwhelming comic book remaining. Let's see how close I can get to finishing it today!
They get off the "bus" and climb a long staircase into a dead god building that is apparently "hell 71." Or contains a portal to it or something. A bouncer tells 82 that his kind aren't welcome here, and 82 tells him that he'll keep that in mind during his visit. 82 also tells Allison not to talk to anyone, not to look anyone in the eye, and to absolutely not let anyone learn her name.
They step into the "building," and...well, it's not safe for work, so unfortunately I can't post it here, but in brief: there's a huge room carved out of the petrified god-corpse, and its full of Hieronymus Bosch creatures haggling, milling about, or putting on sex shows for each other from beneath richly hung canopies. There are more humanlike (actually human?) figures naked, masked, and in chains positioned here and there around the atrium, presumably either for sale or just for decoration. My, but Throne has a lot of slave-brothels, doesn't it? Wonder who's patronizing them? Anyway, on a raised platform at the head of the room is a huge, mangy sphinx-like creature who looks like he's in charge of the place. I'd show a picture of him at least, but he's surrounded by naked slave girls like a furrier version of Jabba the Hutt, so no. I'm guessing this is who they'll need to talk to.
The next page is a very strange and paradoxical excerpt from Bizarro-Psalms that I'm just going to screencap for you because I don't even know how to paraphrase it.
Assuming that Bizarro-Psalms can be taken literally, Yisun did continue existing in some form after he and his lesser selves all split themselves to make the eight hundred thousand gods. And showed up occasionally to guest star in some particularly baffling Oglaf strips.
Back to the story, 82 leads Allison through the throng. Various creatures try to sell her various foods, lineaments, and weirder things as she hurries after the angel. She also has a brief meeting with a human-looking older woman who advises her to "seek heaven through violence" as she passes by. I wonder if she's telling her to die in glorious combat, or to join a violent revolution to restore Throne to its heavenly state. Maybe both. As 82 drags her along passed the lot of them, she asks him why she can understand everyone when before she couldn't.
Guess she's going to need an abortion sometime soon. And will have to eat what's left of the fetus to get a prolonged pan-linguistic effect. Lovely.
Did...hmm. Giving someone a drink that gets them pregnant without their knowledge isn't exactly the same thing as date rape, but it's second cousins at the furthest. 82 is not a nice entity.
On a less gruesome note, if devils have the powers of tongues, and angels presumably do as well (82 was able to talk to her from the beginning), then that means most of the creatures surrounding her when she first arrived on Throne were not devils or angels. They didn't look human either though. Until more information is forthcoming, I'm going to call this evidence for my theory that 82's use of "mankind" is a collective term for all sorts of mortal species that we would probably call aliens.
Finally, they reach Jabba the Sphinx. It turns out that the terrible slave lord and the person who can help Allison are fortunately NOT one and the same. Ciocie is an associate (employee? Slave?) of Jabba's. Wait...in that case, why did 82 need to ask that little red devil where Ciocie was, if he already knew she was attached to Jabba's organization? Their base's location hardly seems to be a secret. Yeah, not sure about that. Well, anyway, Jabba isn't happy to see an angel, but is willing to hear him out.
82 tells Jabba that in exchange for an audience with Ciocie, he'll sell him Allison. A prospect that Jabba seems pleased by.
On one hand, 82 did just warn Allison that he was about to be deceitful, and that it would not be pleasant. On the other, he really could have been more specific and explained to her what the lie would be. As it is, flustered and overwhelmed as she is, Allison seems to totally forget about the "deceitful" thing and thinks that 82 is actually selling her into demonic sex slavery. Or else she does get it, and is just a really, really good actress. She tries to flee, but Jabba picks her up (in a bowl of food. How's that for foreshadowing) and taunts her about how he can't wait to have her "measured," for whatever horrible thing.
Wait, is 82 supposed to be the cat or the dog in this metaphor? Why would a mouse be safer with a cat than with a dog? I wonder if Jabba has ever actually been to a world that had these animals in it.
Jabba agrees to let 82 bring Allison to see Cioie now and then collect her for processing afterward. To make sure the angel is good for it though, he has some slaves shove a pair of masks into a pool of slime, and some of the slime congeals into a pair of voluptuous, naked demon ladies with the masks as their faces. Their names are given as Sweetypie and Honeybunch, and they refer to Jabba as their "father."
...
There was talk earlier of humans having summoned devils by "giving them masks." So, I'm guessing that goo pit was full of devil avatar material, and pressing those two masks in allowed Sweety and Honey (whose spirits had been hanging around nearby) to create bodies for themselves out of it. Either that, or the goo is just what their resting state looks like, and giving them their masks "wakes" them.
Jabba the Sphinx's face looks an awful lot like a mask too. I'll infer from this that he is a devil himself, and that more powerful devils are capable of animating larger forms through their masks.
...
Jabba warns 82 that Sweety and Honey are both extremely quick to resort to violence, and also phenomenally stupid, so he'd better not take too long or try anything clever enough to frustrate them. Okay then. As the sisters lead them to Cioie, they harass Allison about how much they like her hair, mouth, and other features, and say that they can't wait to take them. Oh...dear...82 did say that the slavers have an appetite for "flesh" as a resource distinct from individual slaves, didn't he? And that pool of glop that the sisters formed themselves out of did look dark reddish. I see then.
If that's how it works, though, then did Jabba create his body out of a whole fuckton of cat and dog body parts? Maybe? If so, I maintain that he's still never seen living ones interact with a mouse.
The sisters escort them through hell-71 and toward a flying...hot air balloon?...decorated with eyeballs and feathery wings. Maybe its an actual angel that's been hollowed out and is being used as a hot air balloon, idk, the eyes-and-wings motif seems to be associated with angels based on the flashback panels we've seen. Anyway, the little cyborg drug-dealing devil who 82 interrogated before races to the balloon ahead of them and forewarns Cioie of their arrival. The two of them speak their Clockwork Orange-esque devilbonics at each other, which thankfully are translated into normal English this time.
Is it just me, or does Cioie look like a refugee from Hazbin Hotel?
Cioie seems to be Jabba's bookkeeper. But she also knows how to do magic brain surgery, 82 thinks? Interesting.
The drug devil retreats again before Sweety and Honey bring Allison and 82 in. Cioie seems surprised when the sisters explain that 82 is selling Jabba a new slave in exchange for this meeting. The sisters simply remark that angels can't lie, as it "cracks them up." In the very next panel, we see that a crack has appeared across 82's face and helmet.
Well, that's rather literal! If it happened AT the time he told the lie though, shouldn't Jabba have noticed it? Not sure how this works exactly. Anyway, 82, while suffering the crack for lying, whispers his little mantra apologizing for the violence he's about to commit, and commits violence.
Well, I can't say I didn't see that coming.
Allison freaks out as he pulverizes the sisters. Cioie just shakes her head and complains about not wanting anything to do with any of this violent bullshit, while also warning 82 that the guild's aren't going to keep tolerating him for long if he keeps doing this (I think? Her dialect isn't translated here, so it's kind of hard to understand). She changes her tune, however, when 82 shows her the key embedded in Allison's head and asks if she can remove it. That gets Cioie's attention.
Allison is demanding answers though, which 82 gives her. Mostly confirming things I'd already inferred.
So yeah, Jabba is dissecting slaves to create organic synth-bodies for his minions. And, like angels, bodiless devils can download themselves into new avatars with the right instruments (masks, in their case).
Despite 82's insistence that this is no time to explain more about the Key, Allison refuses to let anything else be said or done until he does so. So, he reluctantly launches into another backstory segment.
...
On one hand, dividing the setting exposition into chunks like this makes it a lot easier to digest. And it makes sense for 82 to be breaking it up, because Allison is even more overwhelmed than the reader and can also only process so much at a time.
On the other, him telling all these parts of Throne's history out of order makes it way the hell more confusing than it had to be. Basically, including this segment here, he's told us the history of Throne in the order of 2-4-1-3. With a lot of the details of the actual, current-time story really depending more on 3 than any of the parts we already heard, so it's only NOW that the plot is really understandable.
I can see why 82 might have explained things in this order, given that he doesn't seem to understand how humans think very well. But in that case, I wish the author could have arranged for another storyteller.
...
Okay, so.
After the 777,777 gods each turned themselves into a satellite universe and left stone hulks of their own bodies behind on Throne, things were pretty quiet for a long time. The angels just silently swept and dusted Throne and kept the stone bodies of their old masters polished and shiny. Until one day, when a wizard - a human from one of the 777,777 universes - managed to break through the wall between the worlds and arrived in Throne.
The human had come here in the hopes of meeting God, but found only towering stone corpses and monstrous angels who attacked him to keep Throne unsullied. As it turns out though, a wizard powerful enough to travel between worlds is also powerful enough to beat up a bunch of angels. He disabled the avatars that the gods had left them with, until none who were willing to keep fighting remained corporeal. Going by the visuals, it looks like the wizard arrived in Throne using a key much like the one stuck in Allison, and he also seems to be using it to fight the angels by...it looks like he's cutting their avatars apart using more dimensional breaches. I like that; the Keys only do one thing (open holes between worlds), but by being creative with the shape, size, and location of said holes you can use them for quite a lot.
Of course, it's also obvious foreshadowing. If Allison can learn some wizardry herself, she can use her own Key to do the same things. Presumably, she will become a dimension-breach-no-jitsu master and use that to kill six billion demons before the comic's end.
Not too long after the wizard's conquest of Throne, his despair at not being able to meet God after all gave way to fascination when other wizards started arriving as well. It's not clear if the magicians of many different worlds all just happened to be working on this at around the same time, or if the first wizard's arrival actually weakened the dimensional barriers and made it easier for the others to do so. 82 says that they came "with the firmament broken," which sounds like the latter, but I could be misunderstanding. These magicians formed a brotherhood of sorts, with the first as their leader.
Demiurges, eh? That's an odd use of the term, given that they didn't actually create anything. It works in the Gnostic sense of "lesser god who interposes themselves between the mortal world and the true divinity," but etymologically it's off.
So, under their newly crowned king, the demiurgi got to work fixing Throne up again after the battle damage it suffered during the Conquering King's one-wizard-army rampage against the angels. And, this is also when the angels were invited back into Throne. Guess I was wrong about the devils having played a role in this, it was just an angel vs mortal (human? Most of the demiurgi look human, and those that don't look like they could conceivably be wearing masks or just self-augmented or the like. ARE humans the only sapient mortal race?) conflict, followed quickly by reconciliation. It seems like the war may have been the result of a misunderstanding, honestly; the angels only saw an invader, and the wizard only saw attacking monsters. Anyway, they crafted new avatars for the angels and happily allowed them to continue maintaining Throne, and they agreed on a set of laws that would bind both angel and demiurge conduct toward one another in the hubworld. Shortly thereafter, they also discovered the devils, who they likewise invited into Throne and created masked avatars for in exchange for more magical knowledge. I guess devils either know more about human-usable magic than angels do, or they're just more willing to talk. They also founded "four orders of knights," which notably does not include the "concordants," so that's unrelated to 82's order I guess.
So, Throne became home to a growing civilization of wizards and embodied spirits. The demiurgi had children, and raised them on Throne where they learned their parents' wizardry and improved on it. More magicians continued arriving now and then from the 777,777 worlds, further adding to the population. The angels and knightly orders policed and maintained the place. The devils taught and experimented. Demiurgic culture revolved around learning; science, magic, and philosophy. However, it didn't remain that way forever.
In an incredible unsubtle bit of symbolism, Cioie interrupts 82 here and tells him that his storytelling is boring and she'll take over now. Seems to be implying pretty hard that the age of philosophy and peaceful study was down to angelic influence on the demiurge, whereas what followed was a result of them listening more to the devils.
The demiurgi made more Keys, and along with them permanent Gates that allowed easy, two-way travel between Throne and the satellite universes. Cioie describes these devices as "tuning forks that catch the voices of the gods." During one of the earlier backstory segments, it was said that the gods each created their own universe by "speaking" them into existence, so this is likely related (also: there's been a centuries-long debate among Abrahamic theologians over whether God created a stable, self-perpetuating universe, or if he's constantly maintaining it through ongoing words of creation. This comic seems to be alluding to that question, and answering it decisively within the world of the story). To illustrate this part, Cioie points out one of the windows in the weird bubble-thing they're in, and shows Allison an active Gate right outside.
The demiurgi created a key and gate for each and every one of the 777,777 parallel worlds. They proceeded to conquer those worlds, and rule them. Many demiurgi left Throne to rule their new kingdoms from within. But, before all 777,777 gates could even be opened, factions of demiurgi already started fighting over the ones that were conquered or mid-conquest. The war escalated onward and onward, until the power-maddened sorcerers were literally burning entire planetary atmospheres away to wipe out each other's armies. In the end, only seven demiurgi worthy of the name remained. I'm guessing they ended up with seven because none of the survivors by that point would ever agree to anything less than an equal slice of the pie, and 777,777 is only divisible by a very short list of integers. These seven wizards, every one of whom had committed genocide after genocide after genocide purely for the sake of not losing, each took sole authority over 111,111 universes. Where there was once one cosmos bearing the number of god, there were now seven empires bearing the number of "me."
So, the last demiurgi - the seven Black Kings - have ruled over a broken and ravaged creation ever since. They have little to no interest in Throne itself, and only rule from there so that they can keep jealous watch over their Gates from one another. Also, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the European age of colonialism, the Black Kings hold "legal" claim to some universes that had never even been opened by the time the Demiurgic Civil War happened, and to others that had been locked away and their Keys lost. Once a universe has had a Gate and Key made for it, you can't make another one. So, each empire "includes" many realities which they are unable to access and whose inhabitants are as ignorant of their "rulers" as the natives of any random island that some European explorer planted a flag on during a two day landing.
It isn't stated, but I'm guessing that the seven are immortal. It's at least been implied that this all happened many human lifetimes ago, and indefinite life extension seems like it could easily be within demiurgic power.
...
So. Now we have the whole story, or at least enough of it to understand the general picture. That was quite the doozy.
I like it, overall. It definitely wears its influences on its sleeve - with regard to both various strands of Abrahamic and Dharmic mysticism, and to other postmodernist-leaning fantasy media - but it uses those elements in a much less cringey manner than I've unfortunately come to expect. It subverts many expectations, but doesn't pointlessly reverse any of them just for the sake of reversing them, nor does it seem like it's trying to be too smart, too philosophical, or too edgy for its own good. Most other "godpunk" stories I've read are guilty of at least two or three of the above, if not all four.
I especially like how rather than going with the lazy platitude of "all myths are true" or the politically fraught "some cultures' myths are right and others are wrong," this story sounds like something that the prophets of every real world religion might have learned bits and pieces of and incorporated into their own native belief systems with varying degrees of fidelity. The complicated, chaotic timeline of the demiurgic era also frees the author from having to point to a specific time in real world history where genuine revelations happened. People could have traveled or exchanged information between our world and Throne at any times, and learned about different status quos from throughout the ages. Basically, the author has been very, very thorough in covering his ass, which I can't help but admire.
I think what intrigues me the most about the K6BDverse is the role that humanity plays in it. Humans (either from our own world or one of the 777,776 others) have taken the place of the gods millennia ago, and been ruling the cosmos as gods with all the trappings thereof ever since. They've got (or at least used to have) the grudging obedience of the angels, and the devils dance to their tune. And yet, they're not any smarter or more rational than normal humans, and even the angels, devils, and gods have a gritty mundanity to them even amid all the fairy tale logic.
It's...in a roundabout way, it actually reminds me of Tolkien's approach to his mythological sources. Middle Earth is a world in which gods and angels look and mostly act like normal, mundane people without sacrificing too much of their grandeur and mystique, and where - by extension - normal, mundane people can walk among the gods.
So, while this story could certainly have told itself in a less frustrating and upside-down way, I'm glad to have made it through. And very much interested in seeing more of this extremely vast and detailed world.
...
And, speaking of gritty mundanity amid a world of fairy tail logic, 82 was totally right when he said that this is no time for long conversations. Just as he's explaining how Allison's Key could reignite multiversal war if it fell into the wrong hands and telling Cioie that she'd better get to work removing it, that fucking smalltime Pimpdemon from much earlier walks in with henchman and cheap shots 82 before he even notices him.
On one hand, fuck. On the other hand, I kind of laughed uproariously for several minutes just because I cannot for the life of me recall the last time a character said "there's no time to explain," was forced to explain anyway, and then turned out to actually be right.
So, 82's going to be invisible and intangible until he can get a new avatar, however long that takes. Seems like that little drug-dealing bat devil told other people where 82 was heading, including people who are out for revenge. The henchman of Pimpdemon's who just took out 82 refers to him (her? 82 seems to get misgendered an awful lot, even by other angels. Or else she actually is a she, and is ashamed of it for whatever reason) as "sisterbrother" and has a very similar looking torso and limbs, so I'm guessing its another angel. Probably a "fallen" one, given that he's being muscle for a rando gangster. I suspect Pimpdemon may have just hired him in the last couple of hours, come to think of it; after how his last bunch of minions fared, he might have decided you really need another angel to fight an angel.
He instructs his angel merc, who he names as 23, to grab Allison and depart before Jabba realizes there's something amiss. He seems to know not only that 82 was coming here, but also that he had a girl with a Key of Kings in his custody.
Huh. The little bat dude must have really been paying attention when 82 accosted him on the bus. He apparently noticed the thing in Allison's head and recognized it for what it was (or perhaps, like 82, he knew about Cioie's history with Key-removal, and when he saw something glowing in her head he put two and two together. In which case he's also much smarter than he came across as well as perceptive). Not sure why he just started going around blabbing about it to everyone, though.
Which also means that as soon as Pimpdemon and 23 drag Allison back downstairs from Cioie's bubble-thing, there's a veritable army waiting for them. Recovery teams sent from at least a dozen gangs, guilds, and other Throne organizations, up to and including the Butchers, Bakers, and Candlestick-Makers' guilds (literally those three. I lol'd, and simultaneously grimaced). Everybody wants to get the reward for turning Allison's key over to the Black Kings (or doing other, likely dastardly, things with it themselves), and unsurprisingly weapons are soon drawn.
Two more excerpts from Bizarro-Psalms, both confusing lessons from Yisun to his divine grandchildren who he somehow co-occurs with about the oneness of reality and the value of its illusory separations. In Yisun's words, all things are one in Himself, and his disunity is a lie, but it's a lie that allows things to happen, so that makes it a good lie to tell. I can imagine him and Siddhartha Gautama having a really long and confusing argument over whether that was actually a good idea, but I think I'd side with Yisun on the principle of body autonomy.
When the story returns, we're shown a cutaway of Hell-71. A very well drawn cutaway, the artist is much better at maps and diagrams than he is at people. An informative one, as well.
According to the caption at the bottom, a "hell" is a god-corpse-building that's being used for criminal operations. Hell-71 was once the god Un-Yam, and is currently the headquarters of Jabba's slaving cartel, which happens to be one of the largest and most brutal gangs in Throne. I can definitely seen how mortal prophets might have seen glimpses of these gangs' hideouts, with the devils cavorting and the slaves suffering, and mistakenly thought this was a divine punishment for sinners. Especially if, say, an earlier prophet had seen glimpses of the wise and peaceful court of the early Conqueror King, and you had to reconcile this vision of suffering with "heaven seems to be run pretty well" without knowing that things had actually changed since then. We also see the various rooms carved into the ancient stone corpse, with little captions that paint a vivid picture of the gang's operations. At the moment, Jabba is in his private sanctum up in Un-Yam's skull, telecommunicating with someone through a magic flame thingy.
The outside of Hell-71 is no less active. A flying turtle monster laden with "cargo" is being unloaded onto a platform attached to the corpse's back, its riders heedless of the fight breaking out in the central chamber. Several more of those "buses" are approaching from all sides; the captions explain that these are discarded avatars once inhabited by powerful angels, and that they've since been reanimated using machinery or magic to be used as vehicles by the gangs and guilds. Come to think of it, we saw the Conqueror King fighting some giant angels that looked a lot like the buses during the flashback when he first came to Throne, so maybe these giant avatars were left from that very battle. Cool! Finally, Cioie's weird bubble thing is sort of floating right behind Un-Yam's shoulder, held down by ropes against a tower with an outdoor staircase. The captions label it as a private outbuilding for Jabba the Sphinx's personal longterm slaves, with Cioie as its only current inhabitant. She's his accountant, apparently. How did Cioie steal a Key of Kings in the past, exactly? Or rather, why is this the best use for an entity capable of stealing a Key of Kings? I guess we'll find out sometime.
So, next page. The gangs all start laying into each other, and Pimpdemon orders 23 to fly away with the bone while the dogs are distracted fighting over it. Un(?)fortunately, the layout of Hell-71 is confusing and mazelike, and 23 ends up accidentally dragging her in a circle and coming right back into the scene of the fight.
There's no way out for her or 23 without generating a lot of corpses on the way, from here. Just as it seems like Allison is about to be literally torn apart by the entities fighting over her, Cioie comes diving out of nowhere, throws 82's inert avatar to the floor in front of Allison, and then casts some kind of spell that turns a wad of papers in her hand into an army of giant paper golem-soldiers that clear a space around them and hold the thugs back.
While announcing her retirement from Jabba's employ.
Hmm. She was a scribe or accountant type thing for Jabba. And she seems to have immense powers related to paper. I think I begin to see why this might have been the most lucrative way for Jabba to use her, depending on what all she can make the papers do.
Cioie hurriedly instructs Allison to pull the dart out of 82's head. Huh? Why? And why can't she just do it herself? Maybe since its an angelic weapon, it'll burn her devilish hands if she tries to touch it or something. Allison hesitates to act, even as the enemy starts breaking its way through the paper barrier, and Cioie gets impatient.
Thus prompted, Allison finally pulls the dart out of the avatar's head, and the spirit of 82 comes pouring back into it as a river of flaming blue eyeballs. He looks around at the carnage, scolds the "idiot girl" for causing this situation to escalate by making him tell the long history in a time sensitive situation, and tells her that now there's no choice but to bring her in to his superiors who will probably kill her to remove the Key.
Allison has had enough.
82 says he regrets his softness for bringing her here and trying to spare her life, and vows he won't make that mistake again. Allison is spared from having to use the sword she just picked up to total ineffect by the return of 23, who seems to be insulted by the sight of 82's avatar up and running again already. Bruh, if you felt that way, maybe you should have made sure it was actually destroyed? Or...hmm. Actually, given from how 82 hopped right back in as soon as Allison removed the dart, maybe there's some sort of very deeply ingrained rule against angels destroying each other's avatars, so that even a rogue like 23 uses special avatar-dampening weapons to shut them down without actually breaking them. The dart he used was really weird looking in a way that most weapons around this place aren't, so that might be it. Anyway, the angel vs angel duel quickly occupies the entire room, as the two practically tear it and the many other combatants apart in their high powered battle.
Which of course gives Allison and Cioie time to slip away. Unfortunately, the only way they can go without marching straight into another wave of would-be kidnappers is upstairs onto a balcony. The fat lady who counseled Allison toward glorious death in combat before (I think it's the same lady, at least? Pretty sure?) but notably has not been taking part in this particular battle has a brief conversation with Cioie as they pass by.
Guess they're both employees of Jabba's, or else the (human?) lady just hangs out here a lot. And, Cioie seems to actually care about the well-being of the slaves who aren't just destined to be pulped for avatar-medium. Cioie is probably the only actually good person Allison has met in Throne so far, at least going by her onscreen behavior. Granted, she may still do something more traditionally devilish, but so far yeah. For now though, she only reinforces my impression as she leads Allison onto the "roof" of the petrified god.
Cioie tells Allison that the only way out for her is to try and use the Key in her head. Jump off the roof, and hope she's able to activate it in her immediate pre-death panic. If it doesn't work, then that's still a kinder death than she'd suffer otherwise.
Allison starts to ask Cioie how she's supposed to rescue her boyfriend who got dragged away just as she was about to lose her virginity with him, but Cioie pushes her.
She falls. Off the roof of Hell-71, Down toward the floor of Throne, as the hands of the guild war-buses closing in all reach out for her. In a white flash, the Key activates, and she's gone. Cioie saved her, but the boyfriend (who I thought was just a hookup. Huh.) remains somewhere in Throne where the monsters dragged him for reasons unknown.
As she transits between the worlds, Allison briefly sees the same creature that implanted her with the Key, and whose head got crushed a second afterward. He confirms that she has "seen his death," which I guess indicates there's some sort of time travel bullshit going on. She accuses him of being the reason this is all happening to her, but he replies that he only did it because she's the one who's destined to save the multiverse. He takes off his helmet, and...well, Allison has no way of knowing this, but we saw the visuals to go with 82's history lesson, and it's the Conquering King. The ancient wizard. The first of the demiurgi.
He calls her "Alice." She corrects him. He ignores her, and just insists that she must slay the seven-headed beast and rebuild the kingdom of heaven. He also tells her to, well...
O...okay Emprah.
And then she moves on to her destination.
There's still about 20 pages left. I guess this will be a three parter after all.
