She felt it happen like the shimmer of moonlight behind tenebrous smoke thin somber vignette fingers. A Dickensian landscape aesthetic lacking Christmas ghosts whispering "rosebud." Curling strings of coughs clasp a grip against the subconscious blizzard of tingle. Black antecedent white.

The underground cosmos is an allegory of rotting religious myth. Twists inside an empty belly of distant spires. Touches a narrow sawtooth firmament. They slightly feel each other but seem to make no attempt at understanding except through hatred. Like statues detesting statues. A simulacrum of the animate. Everything is animate at eighteen point five miles a second.

But does it all matter? Definitely if she can still feel Terra's presence. What's left of Terra's still Terra like a person walking a Victorian street in a Grimshaw painting; oblique in a hollow silhouette of claustrophobia. Terra's a canopy of shrouds, hidden behind what's hidden and behind what's lost. Can feel her apparition through the overwhelming shadows and her centre through the many reflections. But maybe Terra's centre is just another reflection. Maybe there is no such thing as a centre, only interpretation. Can interpretations culminate into a centre? Does it matter? Not now. Not as it is. Not to Lord Rist.

She stands. Watches the door of Good And Evil And Beyond from the corridor of the bullet hole street. Lights are out and haven't flickered in a long half an hour. The entirety of the underground city feels like a tomb with each room of every building a coffin just before burial. Lord tilts her chin. Witnesses the above. Someone is half hanging out of a window of the structure on her left, dead like the person was grown by death to die. Witnesses the stone ceiling sky shudder ominous heaving breaths of eschatology. Dust particles float like silty snow. Rumblings conjure echoing screams from above and below. Everything Will eventually collapse. The Factory of the first reality is doomed.

The door of the bar creeks open in the cavernous silence between the darkness and within its swelling atmosphere. A figure of shroud slightly hovers into the street. Perhaps the illusion is the wonder of how the figure doesn't look like it's walking. Holds a scythe. Lord smells the air like entering a crypt. Dead flowers in a half read book about what the number four means to a columbarium. Muerte.

The death of Terra floats naturally and unnaturally into the street through the false snow. No purpose other than murder pierces every atom in the vicinity. And it seems like the shadows in the dark flee from her like they never would from the light. Like hidden incorporeal creatures of an obscure existence are created conscious enough to make way.

But Lord doesn't flee. Steps her flip flop feet into the street and blocks Muerte from continuing toward an exit or a portal. Doesn't truly know the intention. Muerte holds her scythe in both bloody hands like she's about to reap.

Lord quickly takes hold of the shroud and pulls it away from Muerte's body. Their eyes lock. Lord backs away. Holds the burqa as if Byzantium ever actually existed. Lets it drag across the cement. The raven death girl doesn't yet swing the scythe. Muerte bites her lip and exposes her pearl fangs from a smile like the bones of a marble skin statue with blood stain blotches. No more black teeth. Her long dark hair is disheveled like chlorine damage and a hole in her forehead could be mistaken for a third eye. Seems to stare at Lord. All three unblink. A blonde severed head dangles below her breasts on a necklace made of thin flay tethers of skin. Lord recognizes Pete's face. Blankly stares. Pete...the kid so long ago who saved Janice from the Leonards and received a brain damage beating for his trouble. That Pete. Peterick. Bravest of all the Ghosts before the Leonards disabled him.

Muerte opens her voice. The sound of is like a wave of deep distortion crackling through speakers connecting into a dusty record player. The reverb echoes and bounces off existence and echoes again to bounce off extinction.

"Lord. You've found me. Terra would be so happy to reconcile lovingly. She's dreamed of you and not known why. But I'm the one who destroyed you before and I'm all who's left in here. Have you come to play deja vu?"

For a moment, Lord recognizes the monster standing in front of her. Drops the shroud and before Muerte can react, the scythe is taken from her hands and tossed into the street back toward the bar.

Lord wraps her arms around Muerte and lifts her off her blood stain bare feet to throw her behind herself like some kind of German suplex. Halts her action as their eyes lock. Muerte holds a howling silent gaze within the Venus of years past that seems to echo behind the distant screams above and below. Lord's moment of rage orbits and disappears into a black emerald gravity of Muerte's lie. She's not that monster who decapitated her a decade ago. The Raven girl's eyes are green and pale and osteal and like the rising of a setting sun. Behind her eyes are a whisper of another set, like an apparition of black with green rings. And then another layer of bleary bright forest green, cloudy pale green eyes behind those. Cadmium and castleton and viridian and so on. This woman has depths upon depths. It is in this moment that Lord comes to a complete understanding. This Muerte, this piece of a tortured soul is still Terra. A horrible Terra, but still...fate is a chance that is either danced with or not.

Lord reaches her lips toward Muerte's and kisses her while still crushing her. Sets her down and eases her grip while her lips are still in an embrace. Muerte frees her arms and grabs Lord's head with her bone white vermillion hands and wooden fingernails. Breathes like ghosts and kisses her in return. The moment is like the memory of a small piece of Terra Coal returning again from the afterlife by the paddle of a ferryman.

They make out in the street. Lord breaks the skin of Pete's decapitation and lets his face slide down the dead raven girl's body to their feet. She takes hold of Muerte's backside and presses herself hard against contouring ribs and hips and muscle and flesh. Muerte makes Lord's lip bleed with a nibble from her fangs and they both smile into each others inhales and exhales.

Lord senses a memory like an emotion. Something that's happened before but not to her as far as she knows. It's like she's standing on top of a van in the pouring rain, watching Terra Coal's soaking nudity upon a flat boulder below as ghastly green eyes open all around. She slides down the van's windshield and hurries to the stone through crabgrass and mud. Steps up and embraces Terra and kisses her for the first time. The vision melts into the eyes of Muerte's powerful essence and she recognizes that they both felt it.

Muerte rests her chin on Lord's shoulder and shudders as Lord tip toes her fingers under black panties and onto pubic hair and along and into wetting loins.

"You're mine, Muerte. All mine. I knelt to you back then. You kneel to me now. Give yourself to me, Death."

The dead raven girl moans and grabs Lord by the throat with one hand and a fistful of hair with the other while moving her hips to the rhythm of Lord's fingers. Eyes witness eyes until they kiss again and both bleed from such kisses. Muerte moves her lips away and whispers in the silence of soul screaming orgasms.

"Yes...I'm your's...I'll destroy...everything for you..."

~*~*~*~

They lay in the street like all of the other dead bodies. Unmoving. Resting in peace. Muerte lays atop Lord, skin on skin, aftermath upon epilogue.

"I'm not Terra. I'm not David Leonard's revenant either. I woke up as soon as the bullet entered my brain. I don't know what I am, Lord. Both? Neither? I want revenge. I want Reaper dead. I want to rule this world. And yet...I don't know. I want nothing like that. I want this."

"Maybe we should just stay here for a little while and see what happens."

"Goddesses of the underworld. We're alone. The warring seems to have ended for now. In time maybe I won't care about killing Reaper. For now, in this moment, you're here to take the place of my intentions. I was existing in the future. Now I'm in the moment. Now I'm in your moment."

"Then let fate run its course. He doesn't need us to kill him. Someone's going to get him eventually. Stay with me, Muerte. We're revenants. But we aren't tethered like all of the other David Leonard puppets."

"I'll be your puppet, Lord. Just put your hand in me again."

Smiles. Kisses. Fondles. Each like a puppet and a puppeteer upon the stage of a collapsing world.

~*~*~*~

An enormous chunk of the cavernous ceiling gives way like a jagged slow motion asteroid and levels Good and Evil and Beyond with a thundering explosion of debris. A three story building collapses onto the massive fallen chunk of ceiling with another of God's vulgar booms. Dust and stone crumble covers the entire city like a cloud of asphyxiation.

Two figures walk through the fog of the pitch black street toward a small glow in an alley with an entrance for an exit. The dead raven holds her burqa and scythe and is wearing her nudity barefoot. The Venus wears the other first reality.

"There's two portals in this alley. I remember this place like it was another lifetime in one night. Which one suits you, my Lord?"

"The one with the fireman axe. Beyond the barrier, that world smells better. Like suntan lotion on salt sea skin."

"I smell the ocean, too. Like a sanctuary of summer."

"A sanctuary."

Muerte climbs the divot lines of the brick wall and throws her burqa and scythe through the borderline entrance and turns. Crouches into the portal. Nods and extends her hand. Lord smiles and takes hold. Muerte heaves her up and they both fall backward out of darkness of the collapsing city ceiling and into the sand of a sun bright white beach at the edge of a twisting vine giant leaf jungle. All manner of wilderness express many languages of survival. Blisters of beetles upon limbs of flora. Avian dinosaur with long beak swirling colours. Pinstripe shell crabs scurry sideways to escape the two laying on the beach.

The portal winks behind them like a hollow eye in a mirror closing forever. Fireman axe lays in the sand. Pays no mind. Lord kicks off her flip flops. Buries her feet like dogs in a pet cemetery vacation. Feels the simulation. The sun.The sanctuary. Her soon to be sunburnt lover. Notices the jungle's shade. A set of green eyes open in the tenebrous cast of such width and depth. Pays no mind. Stands. Strips. Runs to the ocean. Dives into the salt sea. Turns and beckons Muerte to join. Her lover does.