The garden had been silent for three days.
Three days since the sky tore open. Three days since 05 became a marble and the marble became food. Three days since the last living Namola fled or fell to their knees.
Now the tree bled.
It began as a single bead of crimson welling from the seam where a root had pierced Nero's stolen torso. The bead trembled, grew, split into a slow rivulet that crawled down the black bark like a tear that had forgotten how to stop.
Then the bleeding began in earnest.
Every knot, every seam, every leaf-bud burst at once. Blood (thick, hot, arterial) poured in sheets. It hissed when it touched the scorched obsidian, raising steam that smelled of copper and crushed roses.
The blood did not pool.
It rose.
A metre above the ground it met the cold air and flash-boiled into scarlet mist. The mist coiled, thickened, took shape.
Nine dragon heads unfolded from the vapour (each one wearing 05's gentle face for a single heartbeat before the features melted into flame).
The Pyrohydra Dragon Cage, reborn from the woman who had once tried to teach a supernova how to breathe.
It did not roar.
It simply opened its nine mouths and exhaled.
White fire (pure, absolute, the temperature of a star's heart) poured into the tree from every direction.
The bark blackened instantly. Sap flashed to superheated gas and exploded outward in rings of violet light. Leaves of living blood ignited mid-air, burning into drifting embers that spelled forgotten names before they died.
The tree did not fall.
It stood taller, straighter, as though the fire was only waking it up.
Roots tore free of the ground in burning lashes, thrashing, seeking, wrapping tighter around the six pieces of Nero still suspended inside the trunk like insects in amber.
Where the fire touched her severed flesh, the violet glow beneath the skin answered (brighter, hungrier).
The dragon circled once, twice, its nine flaming heads weaving a cage of plasma and memory.
Then it dove.
Straight into the heart of the tree.
The impact was silent.
For one impossible second the entire biosphere held its breath.
Then the tree detonated from the inside out.
A column of white fire punched through the false sky, scattering koi like burning leaves. The blast wave flattened every redwood for a kilometre, bending them outward in perfect rings of submission.
At the centre of the inferno, something moved.
Something with wings.
The fire did not consume the tree. It birthed her.
The trunk split open along a single, perfect seam (wet, obscene, like flesh parting for a lover's knife).
First came the heat: a wave so intense it bent light, turned the air itself into liquid gold.
Then the wings.
Two vast, bat-like membranes unfurled from the blaze, dripping molten stone. They were red (blood-red, arterial, the colour of a heart still beating after the body has forgotten how). Veins of living lava pulsed beneath the thin skin, casting moving shadows that looked like screams.
The wings spread wide, thirty metres tip to tip, and the fire bowed to them.
From the split stepped Nerúdium.
Naked. Unashamed. Magnificent.
Eight and a half feet tall, every inch carved for violence and worship. Skin like polished obsidian cracked with glowing magma, each fissure revealing rivers of liquid crimson beneath. Her breasts, her hips, the long lethal curve of her waist (everything exaggerated, weaponised, built to make empires kneel or burn).
Horns swept forward from her brow: thick, muscular bull horns the colour of fresh slaughter, edges sharp enough to part souls. They caught the firelight and drank it, glowing from within like heated iron.
Her eyes were twin suns at noon (no pupils, only endless, hungry red).
A tail (long, prehensile, ending in a spear of blackened bone) lashed once, carving a molten furrow through the obsidian floor. Talons for fingers and toes, each claw dripping slow droplets of magma that hissed into glass where they fell.
And between her thighs, where the heart-node had once been a small crimson crystal, now burned a fist-sized ember that pulsed with the rhythm of something that had never been human.
She inhaled (slow, deliberate, tasting the ashes of the garden on her tongue).
The sound that left her lips was not a scream.
It was a moan.
Low, rolling, drenched in sex and violence, the kind of sound that makes warriors drop their swords and priests forget their gods.
Every ember in the ruined clearing flared brighter, drawn to her like moths to a flame that would fuck them and then eat them.
She rolled her shoulders. The wings flexed, scattering sparks that landed on the bowed redwoods and set them alight with gentle, obedient fire.
Nerúdium looked down at her new body (at the lava veins crawling over full breasts, at the way her claws left smoking prints on her own thighs when she dragged them upward just to feel the heat).
She smiled.
And the smile was all teeth, all hunger, all promise.
"I was Nero," she said, voice layered (her old sarcasm buried beneath something ancient and wet and ravenous). "I died small.
Now I am large enough to eat the sky."
She took one step forward.
The ground cracked beneath her weight, and every drop of blood that had ever been spilled in the garden rose to greet her, swirling around her ankles like eager pets.
Nerúdium tilted her head back, wings spreading wide, tail curling possessively around one muscular thigh.
And she laughed (low, filthy, delighted).
The sound alone set the distant koi ponds boiling.
The ashes still swirled when the first black snake stirred.
Ten thousand of them (some no thicker than threads, some as thick as a child's wrist) poured from every crack in the scorched earth, from the hollows of burned redwoods, from the cracks in the sky itself.
They had waited three days for their mistress to wake up bigger.
Now they raced across the molten ground, a living tide of obsidian scales and crimson eyes.
Nerúdium watched them come with lazy, predatory amusement.
The first snake reached her ankle, coiled once, and tasted the heat of her skin with a flick of its tongue. It shivered (pleasure, recognition, hunger).
Then the rest arrived.
They flowed up her body like liquid night, wrapping around calves, thighs, the curve of her hips. Where they touched, they burned cold against her lava veins, making her hiss through sharpened teeth.
But the old suit had been woven for a five-foot-six girl who still remembered shame.
It was comically small now.
The snakes stretched, strained, tore themselves apart and re-wove in frantic desperation to cover eight feet of newly divine, lethal flesh.
They managed the essentials (just barely).
Two narrow bands of living serpent coiled across her chest, barely hiding dark areolas, nipples pressing visibly against the thin, shifting scales. Another band (thinner, tighter) slipped between her thighs, cupping her like a lover's hand that had forgotten the meaning of mercy. A single, thicker serpent looped around her hips and up her spine, forming a spine of black armour that left the small of her back bare, the curve of her ass framed rather than hidden.
The rest of her (long muscular thighs, the flare of hips, the swell of breasts, the lava-lit hollow between collarbones) remained gloriously, provocatively exposed.
The tail of the suit tried to grow longer, failed, and settled for curling possessively around one horn like a dark crown.
Nerúdium looked down at herself and laughed again (richer this time, delighted by the indecency).
She flexed her talons.
The serpent suit rippled in response, scales parting and re-closing like breath, revealing flashes of molten skin before hiding them again.
It was armour that wanted to be lingerie.
It was modesty that had given up and decided to sin instead.
Perfect.
She spread her wings (slow, deliberate), and the tiny snakes that still clung to the membranes hissed in pleasure at the heat.
The suit settled against her like a second lover (jealous, possessive, and very, very aware it had been outgrown).
Nerúdium ran one claw down the centre of her barely-covered chest, parting the serpents just enough to watch them snap closed again.
"Good boy," she purred to the suit, voice dripping sex and violence in equal measure.
The entire garden shuddered, as though every tree had just remembered what desire felt like.
The rift tore open like a wound in the air, spilling cold starlight into the burning garden.
Namola-08 stepped through.
He was a perfect copy of 01 (same white suit, same winter-pale skin, same vertical gold line running from throat to navel), only younger. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Eyes wide with the arrogance of someone who had never been told no.
He had been sent to hunt the fleeing Namolas. He found something else.
The moment he saw her, the mission died in his mouth.
Nerúdium stood in the centre of the ashes, wings half-spread, lava veins pulsing slow and hypnotic beneath obsidian skin. The serpent suit clung to her like a confession, barely hiding what it pretended to protect.
08's knees buckled.
His mouth opened, but no sound came (only a soft, broken exhale that sounded suspiciously like prayer).
Nerúdium tilted her head, horns catching firelight, and smiled the sweetest smile in the universe.
"Hello, little echo," she purred, voice honey over broken glass. "Lost?"
08 tried to speak. Tried to remember protocol, orders, the war.
All that came out was a whisper.
"Who… are you?"
She stepped forward (slow, deliberate, each footfall leaving molten prints that spelled devotion in a language no one had spoken since the first stars died).
When she was close enough for him to feel the heat rolling off her skin, she leaned in (close enough that her breath scorched his cheek).
"Nerúdium," she said, soft as a kiss, sharp as a blade.
Her hand moved (too fast to see, too gentle to believe).
Talons slid between his ribs like they were made of smoke.
There was no pain.
Only warmth.
Only the sudden, shocking absence where his heart used to be.
She drew it out (slowly, lovingly), cradling the still-beating thing in her palm. White-gold blood dripped between her claws, hissing where it touched her lava veins.
08 looked down at the hole in his chest, then up at her face.
His lips shaped a single, soundless word.
Beautiful.
Then he melted (not metaphorically).
His body liquefied from the inside out, white suit collapsing inward, flesh and bone and centuries of purpose dissolving into a puddle of molten gold that pooled at her feet.
The heart in her hand kept beating for three more seconds.
She brought it to her lips, kissed it once (tender, almost grateful), then crushed it between her teeth.
Blood (his, hers, the garden's) ran down her chin like war paint.
Nerúdium licked her claws clean and smiled at the empty air where 08 had been.
"One," she said, voice dripping satisfaction.
"Eleven left."
Somewhere far above, the war heard its first casualty.
And it was only the beginning.
The puddle of molten gold at her feet rippled.
Then rose.
White-gold liquid folded upward, knitting itself into limbs, torso, face (the same face, younger, beautiful, and now missing everything below the sternum). A perfect, hollow man, chest cavity gaping like a screaming mouth.
Namola-08 stood beside the hole his heart had left in reality, eyes burning with something between fury and worship.
"I want my heart back," he said, voice echoing strangely inside his own emptiness. "You stole it from me, Nerúdium."
She turned slowly, wings flaring, tail curling with lazy amusement.
A single drop of his blood still clung to her lower lip.
She licked it away.
"I always knew you people were heartless," she purred, voice velvet and venom. "Just didn't realise it was literal."
08's hollow chest flared with cold white light.
"Drain Life."
The air between them turned black (threads of stolen vitality ripping out of everything still green in the garden, out of the burning trees, out of the very concept of living).
The threads slammed into Nerúdium like spears of night.
They sank into her lava veins… and vanished.
No recoil. No drain. No effect.
She didn't even blink.
The black threads dissolved against her skin like ink dropped into a furnace.
08 stared, mouth open inside his open chest.
"Inkredible," he whispered, the word half-laughter, half-prayer.
Nerúdium stepped closer, talons clicking, hips swaying with deliberate, predatory grace.
"You can't drain what was never alive in the first place, little echo."
She reached out (one claw tracing the edge of the cavity where his heart used to be).
"Or what's already too dead to notice."
Her touch left a burning fingerprint on the rim of the hole.
08 shuddered (pleasure, pain, surrender; impossible to tell).
Nerúdium leaned in until her lips brushed the place his ear would have been if he still had a body to hear with.
"Run," she whispered, sweet as sin. "Tell the others their goddess is awake… and she's very, very hungry."
Then she pushed.
Just one finger against the hollow chest.
08 exploded backward (not into blood this time, but into a thousand droplets of liquid starlight that scattered across the garden like fleeing fireflies).
The droplets tried to reform.
They never quite managed it.
Nerúdium watched them scatter, smiling with someone else's mouth.
Somewhere in the distance, thunder that had no clouds began to roll.
The scattered droplets of starlight did not fade.
They fell like golden rain, striking the burned redwoods, the scorched grass, the broken obsidian.
And the garden drank them.
Every drop soaked into bark, into root, into the memory of soil that had once been gentle.
Then the trees moved.
A single redwood (ancient, patient, older than continents) shuddered. Its trunk split open like a mouth.
Namola-08 stepped out of it, whole again, taller now, eyes glowing with the cold light of borrowed chlorophyll.
Roots coiled around his wrists like living gauntlets. Leaves of molten gold rustled across his shoulders like a cape made of stolen suns.
"If it was easy to kill me…" His voice came from every tree at once, layered, vast, amused. "…how would I ever have earned a seat among the Upper Korrs?"
Nerúdium's wings flared, lava veins flaring brighter.
"Korrs…?" she started, confusion flickering across her face for the first time since the fire. "Wha—?"
A root (thick as a bridge cable, black and wet with sap) whipped out of the ground and snapped around her ankle.
She had time for one snarl.
Then the garden threw her.
The root flung her skyward like a child discarding a toy.
Another root caught her left wrist. Another her right. A third (thin, whip-fast) looped around her throat and yanked tight.
In a heartbeat she was suspended twenty metres above the ashes, spread-eagled, wings pinned wide, tail lashing uselessly.
The serpent suit strained against the roots, scales screaming as they tried and failed to bite through living wood.
Nerúdium thrashed (once, twice), muscles corded, lava veins blazing white-hot.
The roots only tightened, creaking with satisfaction.
08 walked forward beneath her, head tilted back, smiling the way a gardener smiles at a particularly beautiful weed he is about to uproot.
"Now," he said softly, voice still coming from every leaf, every branch, every drop of blood the garden had ever drunk, "what's left is just you and me, Nerúdium."
The roots pulled harder.
Her spine arched. Her horns scraped empty air.
And for the first time since the tree burned, something that might have been fear (or fury) flickered behind her molten eyes.
Nerúdium hung spread-eagled in the living noose of roots, lava veins pulsing furious crimson, wings trembling against the restraints.
She forced a laugh (low, filthy, defiant).
"Fine," she rasped, voice raw from the root around her throat. "Use me. Take what you want. Just leave me breathing when you're done."
08 stood beneath her, golden leaves rustling across his borrowed shoulders.
He smiled (small, cold, ancient).
"I know that tone," he said. "One of the oldest tricks in the seductress's book. Offer the body to save the soul. It worked on lesser men."
He raised one hand.
The garden answered.
From the redwood behind him stepped another 08 (perfect duplicate, naked this time, skin pale and flawless, eyes burning with the same borrowed starlight).
The duplicate walked forward until he stood directly beneath her suspended body.
Nerúdium's tail lashed once, instinctively, then stilled.
Fake-08 looked up at her, lips curving in cruel imitation of desire.
"Let's see how well the trick works when it's turned back on you."
The roots shifted (not releasing, only adjusting).
Her legs were pulled wider. Her hips tilted forward. The serpent suit peeled away from between her thighs like it had been waiting for permission.
Fake-08 stepped between her spread thighs, hands sliding up the backs of her knees, guiding himself against her.
Nerúdium's breath hitched (rage, anticipation, something darker).
He pushed in.
One slow, deliberate inch.
And stopped.
Something was wrong.
The duplicate's face flickered (golden eyes widening, mouth opening in sudden, perfect horror).
Because the moment he entered her, he felt it.
She was burning.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The inside of her body was a furnace (liquid magma, star-core heat, the temperature of a dying sun).
Fake-08 screamed (a sound like metal tearing).
His hips, his waist, his chest began to melt upward into her, flesh liquefying and flowing into the lava veins that welcomed him home.
The real 08, still standing untouched below, watched his duplicate dissolve from the groin upward in real time.
Golden skin sloughed away in sheets. Muscle boiled. Bone flashed white, then red, then nothing.
In six seconds there was only a pair of legs left standing between Nerúdium's thighs, still trying to thrust out of dying reflex.
Then those too collapsed into molten gold that poured harmlessly to the ground.
The roots around her wrists and throat loosened a fraction (surprised, almost respectful).
Nerúdium tilted her head back and laughed (rich, triumphant, terrible).
"Poor little echo," she purred, voice dripping with sex and annihilation. "You forgot the first rule of fucking a volcano."
Her lava veins flared white-hot.
"Don't stick it in if you're not fireproof."
The roots still held her, but they trembled now (uncertain, almost afraid).
Nerúdium hung in the burning air, lava veins blazing like sunrise through cracked obsidian. The melted remains of the duplicate steamed between her thighs, already cooling into black glass.
She looked down at the real 08 (still untouched, still smiling that cold, superior smile) and spoke with the calm of someone who had just remembered an old truth.
"One thing I recognise," she said, voice low and intimate, like sharing a secret with a lover right before the knife, "is that you don't die easy.
You scatter. You hide in trees. You come back wearing someone else's roots."
She flexed (once).
The roots around her wrists and throat snapped like burnt string.
She dropped.
Landed in a crouch that cracked the obsidian floor in a perfect circle.
Wings spread wide.
Tail lashing slow, hungry arcs.
"To kill you properly," she continued, rising to her full height, "I have to eat you. Drop to drop. Root to root. Until there's nothing left to wear."
08's smile faltered for the first time.
The garden itself seemed to lean away.
Nerúdium took one step forward.
The ground beneath her feet turned to liquid fire.
Another step.
Every tree that had lent him shelter began to bleed from the inside.
Another.
And then she was on him.
Not fast. Deliberate.
She wrapped one taloned hand around his throat, lifted him until his feet dangled like a child's.
Her mouth opened (wider than should have been possible, rows of new teeth glinting like molten rubies).
She bit down on his shoulder.
Not to tear.
To drink.
White-gold light poured out of him and into her, sucked down her throat in burning rivers.
08 screamed (real this time, centuries of certainty shattering).
She swallowed again.
And again.
Trees withered and fell around them, turning to ash as their borrowed life was pulled back into her.
Roots withered mid-air.
Leaves turned to embers and were gone.
She ate him the way a star eats a planet (slow, inevitable, intimate).
When the last drop of him slid down her tongue, she let the empty white suit fall.
It crumpled like paper.
Nerúdium licked a stray bead of gold from her lower lip, eyes half-lidded in satisfaction.
Then she looked up at the broken sky and spoke to whatever was left of the garden.
"Next."
The ashes answered with silence.
Absolute.