The lemur stared at the fruit in the bowl. It was an evil thing. Pale and colorless with black veins beneath.

It was also the work of his goddess. His goddess, who brought painful knowledge and paths that wound through suffering, burnt his skin and rent his flesh open to the bone. Who asked for him to walk without knowing why.

Who spoke to him only to laugh at those who believed in her as he did.

Was his goddess a kind one? No, no. Kindness was not in her nature. Was she good?

What would be a good thing for a goddess to do?

He had always assumed goodness flowed from the gods, that the right thing was the thing that obeyed, but if there was a duty they could fail, then that asked whether following a wrong-god could be right. It was a twisting, ugly worm of a thought.

“Hey.” Imani kneeled beside him, stroking his furs behind the ears. He remembered when he was young how the tribe could comb him for ticks. “It’s alright. You should just let this go.”

All his ticks had been burnt away by fire, or eaten by the caustic oozes; he had shed the life that lived atop his skin and only barely survived himself. Ticks were a strange thing to feel nostalgia for.

But nostalgia was a strange emotion for a lemur to know.

In the distance, there was a sound of shattering stone and glass. He turned his head, but saw nothing beyond the outer gates of the temple-gardens. The stone warriors were fighting for their goddess. Maybe it was a good fight.

“It’s not your fault if people are so obsessed with tests and rituals and nonsense-” She glared at the other living statue, who lifted her chin and sneered down. No love was lost between Imani and her sisters. “That they forget what actually matters. Some people just want to be right and don’t care about what’s good or bad. It’s not on you to convince them, and if they’re really going to sit here and do nothing until someone tortures themselves eating that stupid thing, that’s their own fault.”

The lemur lifted his head.

She smiled, but he was looking past her. Hearing something beyond words. The goddess had opened his mind to the flow of secret things, and some lingering sense, some understanding, let him feel the air bristle with the presence of other powers like her own.

The power that had created him, the spirit of the oasis, was fighting with the enemy who had taken his brothers. The air resonated with hidden violence as they met and clashed in the place only the gods knew of.

He looked down at the fruit.

Nobody had said it had to be him who ate the cursed thing. They’d implied, yes, but-

But he was now a thing that understood an implication was not a law.

He cooed the note of satisfaction, the sound of finding cool shade on a hot day or sweet flesh inside a hard shell. Yes. This was good. Turning towards Imani, he chittered, the excited tone of a new friend. Yes. She had seemed to talk too much, and yes, she understood nothing of what he said and didn’t seem to notice.

But she had been a thinking-thing for longer than him, and seemed wise. Maybe people talked because they had thoughts they needed to be rid of. That seemed right. His head buzzed with a thousand thoughts as he picked up the fruit in his peace-hand and rose.

He did not know if the fight was good. He did not know many things, anymore; his mind had overflowed with too much knowing and been emptied again as knowledge turned into doubt. But the lemur would lose the last thing he called family if the spirit died.

So he rose and walked through the garden. He felt the stone eyes of the tower’s many faces follow him, and heard Imani walking behind. The dark trees of the garden stared at him, the blank-eyed people within seeing nothing, hearing not a sound of the distant battle. It was almost peaceful beneath the thorned branches. Floating spheres of bronze bled a perpetual twilight over the trees.

And then he stepped through the gate, out onto the temple’s high marble steps, to see the city in chaos.

The invaders had torn down the barricades of bells, the lines of salt. The dead roamed free, glomming together into tangles of limbs trapped by dripping strands of black glass, forming into the shapes of giant animals as they merged. Cats, serpents, all manner of things roamed, formed from dozens of bodies fused together under slick glass the color of midnight. They roamed taller than the broken-down buildings, howling with hunger.

They were outnumbered on all sides by the newcomers. Wolves with no skin over their faces hunted in packs on the streets, and things with dark flat bodies like sails and whip-thin tail-stings flowed through the air. A thing like a six-legged goat roamed the city, its head reptilian, a crocodile's muzzle covered in stringy grey fur; a tide of smaller creatures fell from an open wound cut in its side.

They were ugly things. They made the hollow, sad dignity of the city ugly with their wild hunger, ripping the walking corpses apart for flesh and chewing shards of black glass alongside the bloodless gristle of the long dead.

In the center of the chaos were the warrior-statues, their polished armor gleaming in the night as their spears jabbed out like biting serpents, their shields raised into unbreakable walls, moving as a single creature in the shape of a wedge that broke the enemy's ranks open. They warred with creatures made of bone with serpentine lower bodies and huge, four-armed humanoid torsos, a sword in each hand. Those blades were huge slabs of dull iron, and they swept down to hammer aside shields and crack stone flesh to splinters.

They would be fine. Or they would not be fine, and the lemur would not care.

“Ugh. You really going out there? What a mess.” Imani had her face half-covered by a hand, gazing out. “I think my home’s probably been burned…”

A shadow sailed through the air. Rooftop tiles cracked as a colossal glass ape landed atop a villa that stood proud in the garden district around the temple’s foundations. The beast’s dull glass eyes fixed on the lemur, a growl purring from its throat.

It would do.

He braced and leapt forward, bounding down the steps. The ape left the rooftop in a single bound, cracking the marble as it landed; a fist like a mallet plunged down.

The lemur danced aside like a shadow, finding the movement strangely dull. The sheer size of his foe made the air bend to a deafening roar as the first slipped past him and shattered the step where had been. His war-hand carved across the beast’s forearm in a strike that left a deep gouge, slowly filling in with molten glass.

It swept into a backhand, and the lemur ran underneath, bounding on all four limbs beneath the wide haymaker blow and leaping upwards as it passed. The ape roared, the bodies buried in its glass flesh staring out with empty eyes; the lemur’s blade hooked against the beast’s neck, feet finding purchase, clinging on as the ape swung around and tried to throw him free.

His peace-hand reared up, fruit clutched and crushed in his thin leathery fingers. He punched down for the beast’s open maw.

The ape grasped his leg in a thick hand and yanked him away in the instant before he could shove the fruit down its throat. The world spun as it swung him through the air, and in blind panic his scythe-finger lashing out, ripping away the thick digits that grasped his leg. He flew in a long weightless arc, and hit the stairs hard, crashing head over heels down.

Instinct had him moving, throwing himself into a roll that got him out of the way as the beast came crashing past. It grasped the earth and anchored itself to swing around on one arm, dragging sparks as it tore through the cobbles with its fingers, stumpy legs kicking to build momentum and send it towards him again.

He felt a certain resignation. A steel-clad certainty this would be the last time he fought, one way or the other.

The lemur was only fighting so that he could choose how it ended.

This time the ape reared up, hands open, swiping the air to try and get ahold of him. He was forced back, and back, until he was against a broken wall. Vaulting up, he slid through a hole in the roof and down into the dark below as the beast slammed a hand through after him, groping blindly, seeking him as he slid through the hollow building.

He cut away its fingers and broke through the half-fallen door, into a dark courtyard. The dead lay in puddles of glass around dead trees. The fruit was pulp in his grasp, writhing like a beating heart as the bruised flesh regrew again and again.

The ape vaulted up and crashed down into the courtyard as the house collapsed into an avalanche rubble under its feet. The lemur darted aside from the wave of falling stones, leapt into the branches above, and kicked off onto the next rooftop an instant before a massive hand tore the tree from the earth.

For a moment he was a step ahead. Dancing under the shadow of the giant. There was a beauty to how every blow missed him by fractions of an inch. Then the ape roared, flinging the tree at his head, and the lemur only had a split second to brace - not even close to being able to escape.

The rooftop shattered, absorbing much of the blow. The impact flung him away and down into the streets, bruised, breathless, underneath a cloud of settling dust. The fruit lay on the cobbles beside him regenerating from a stain of juice and splattered flesh. Again, he felt the all-encompassing presence of pain, shocking through his body in waves.

It was familiar now. But he was tired, so very tired, of knowing it so well.

Above, the air rippled. The spirit fought and the Abyssal things pressed down from all sides. The streets were busy with howls, sounds of flesh tearing, the city being consumed bite by bite.

The ape had lost him; he lay beneath rubble with his fur painted bone white. The beast lumbered past, searching for its prey, but the city was full of noise and light and the promise of other good things to eat slowly lured it away. The lemur did not move to rise even when it left.

A thin light flickered in the distance. Moonlight. The goddess calling out.

He closed his eyes.

This time he would not listen. There would be no more suffering for nothing.

But when he opened them again, he realized - the light was not for him. A man was limping through the city, his body covered by tattered, burned clothes. Covered in wounds that clawed his rocky flesh. He was following the lights as they leapt from one piece of rubble to the next. The goddess’ path leading him to the safety of the temple.

There was a flicker and a thing stood behind the injured man. A thing that warped the air but had no shape of its own.

The lemur would not follow her light anymore; it was too much pain, and he no longer saw pain as something to be proud of. He had born each scar, each burn, each broken bone like a trophy, felt honor in the hurt that burned inside his body, and he had earned nothing but more of the same.

He could do this much. He would not let this man who followed the path die.

The space-shape-thing flickered forward again, slowly closing in. The lemur pushed up from the rubble like a ghost in white dust. It turned-

It vanished-

It reformed in front of him, a hand reaching out for his neck. His peace-arm plunged forward and drove the poison fruit into its heart, shattering his fingers into a million pieces as they pushed into the chaotic swirl of broken space there.

The fruit dissolved into dark seeds and moon-white flesh. Poison juice spilled through the creature’s body.

Its hand halted and it shivered horribly, clutching at itself with its long, long arms. The fruit splattered down in pieces alongside the ruin of his hand. He stared at his stump, and past the clean-cut end, at the elemental. It warped outwards, growing, then shrank down, old and then young again, over and over.

A high-pitched shriek filled the air and it retreat, vaulting backwards, blinking through the air as he bared his fangs and snarled.

He didn’t even think he had truly managed to injure the beast.

It just hadn’t known pain before.

That was all. He slumped down, losing too much blood too quickly, feeling a certain empty numbness spread up from the wound. His eyes began to close and he knew he would be asleep before he hit the ground.

The man with the stone skin wrapped an arm around him, and lifted the lemur across his shoulder. The beast’s yellow-moon eyes watched dimly, without light, as the man ignored his own wounds and carried him towards the temple.