Ty felt the creature duck through tunnels and climb steeply. He saw little in the total darkness except the odd winking light or trembling egg-shaped gold colored crystal.

With no warning, the creature emerged into the brilliantly lit central temple. They were on a disrepaired balcony, high above the one Ty and Siona had made love on earlier. The titanic black generative crystals in the roof loomed close, and Ty could clearly see the sapphire blue pillar in the center of the floor.

Taka slammed Ty against the wall and he stuck there. With a series of snaps, Taka separated the mass binding Ty from itself and silently left the way it had came. Ty was alone. He struggled to free himself but was unable. He took a moment to catch his breath and decide what to do.

Ty saw movement far below. A tiny blue pixie was making her way down a metal catwalk that hovered just above the surface of the vast reservoir of slime in the floor of the place. Ty cried out to Siona in vain, his mouth was bound and she was much too far away.

Siona made her way to the single sapphire pillar in the center of the temple and climbed it with ease. Ty saw now that she was holding something small and brown. She sat on the seat shape at the pinnacle of the crystal and seemed to cradle and rock the object in her arms.

Ty squinted. The object she held was Ty’s broken sand boot. A look of infinite peace was on her face. She clutched the boot tightly to her round breasts and placed her chin in the palm of her free hand. Siona reached down and caressed a line of reactive runes. A massive cylindrical wall began to surround what Ty thought of as the temple’s throne room.

Sionas words floated through Ty’s mind - “Locked me in here… I sat there… just like this, with my chin in my hands, for two thousand more years.” Ty’s eyes went wide and he struggled against his bindings and screamed against the tar choking his mouth.

Before the wall could cut off Ty’s view of Siona, Ty saw Taka. It loomed suddenly behind Siona. It’s quivering appendage closed around her neck, then Ty was cut off, left staring at a slate blue blast wall.

Ty wanted desperately to disbelieve what he had seen, but he could not. Ty went mad.

Nothing in the world mattered. His screaming muscles were news from a distant country as he bucked and threw every ounce of his force against his bonds. Slowly, they peeled back in layers, snapping like rubber bands. The tendrils slapped at him as he escaped but he slashed at the savagely and they fell to the balcony, flopping like fish.

The jagged black crystals protruding from the leaden slime hundreds of feet below him didn’t matter. He leapt from the balcony without hesitation and jammed his sword into a flowing glass pillar drooling from the ceiling. The resistance lowered him hundreds of feet down to the catwalk just barely slow enough to keep him from being injured.

Ty ran down the catwalk as fast as his desert-dwellers legs could carry him. The solid blast wall did not matter to him either, but it turned out to be no obstruction anyway: he merely ducked through the hole Taka had ripped in it millennia ago.

Ty saw neither Taka nor Siona, but his mind was gone and in it’s place was a machine that easily tracked a high velocity spray of blue to a conduit that extended below, through the reservoir and into the wall of the temple. Ty leapt in.

Following it through darkness, Ty came to a wide room. A frame leaned against the wall at its opposite end, and in the frame an orange field glowed dimly. Past the field, another room was visible. Ty was dimly aware that this was some sort of teleporter, and the black, tarry tacks holding it up told him it had been erected by Taka itself. Ty barely paused as he stormed through.

Ty emerged into a claustrophobic room full of vents and machinery. Filthy yellow lights flickered on and off unpredictably. The place smelled salty and putrid, like diseased blood. Ty realized distantly that he had entered Taka’s lair.

Ty stalwartly followed the intermittent spattered blue fans, which were growing in size. Ty began to hear wet, squelching, packing sounds.

Ty entered a room, and for a moment his madness was snuffed like a candle. In the center of the room lay a third of Siona, her head split down the middle, hair sticking to her face. She was gibbering and flinching in time with the sounds of something being beaten savagely in the next room.

Ty dropped to his knees. He took the piece by its arm and cradled it, brushing its matted hair back. He could do nothing more. The piece was unconscious, it’s self-image shattered, but its eye rolled and blinked in pain. Ty began to hear Sionas voice from the next room, pleading and sobbing petulantly and Ty knew he would have to leave this piece of Siona behind in order to save the rest of her.

Words escaped from Ty before he could realize he was saying them.

“I’m never going to leave you again. You never had to bring me to the temple; I can’t leave, I wouldn’t want to. I’m with you forever.”

Sionas trembling form only continued gibbering nonsense, agonized syllables, but its hand squeezed feebly on his for a moment. Ty set her down gently and brushed the matted hair off its face.

When he turned toward the door, the world fell aside once again and a red haze of fury covered his vision. When he stepped into the room, two creatures of pure hatred faced one another.

The room was coated with blue splatters, covering some of the lights and throwing the room into a dizzying pattern of blue and yellow and shadows. Taka had been beating Siona with a horrifically clawed appendage. Ty’s entrance caused it to hesitate, and Ty observed with some relief that Siona’s abdomen began to reform from the grisly mash it had been. Her head rolled and she saw him. She smiled, and fainted immediately.

Ty knew this creature had killed thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people. He had no reason to believe he would survive this encounter, but when he charged Taka with all his force, he did so with no hesitation.

Ty’s violent shoulder check connected with Taka hard enough to drive the creature through the flimsy hatch behind it and into a cavernous room. Ty followed it onto a catwalk. The room was an immense cylinder bathed in low, purple light and measured half a mile in diameter.

Ty and Taka faced each other on a catwalk suspended precariously over the city’s Grand Reactor, entropy-proof and immense, a field of lethal purple radiation protecting the leviathan below them like a distant and alien landscape.

Taka swung at Ty, but he dodged easily, baring his teeth, and severed the creature’s limb. Ty immediately retaliated, slashing with all his force at the creature’s neck as he had before. When he retrieved his sword, Takas head lolled bizarrely. The wound did not reseal.

Taka staggered backward, but Ty was relentless. He slashed savagely at its chest and arms, thick bands falling away and seeming to die immediately. Ty dropped his sword and shoved Taka to the ground. It toppled like a child, and Ty landed on top of it.

The squelching packing sounds resumed as Ty began to beat the creature’s face. Blood streamed from Ty’s lip as he bit down on it in insane rage. Ty began clawing at Taka, his nails cracking and ripping free, but tearing off large chunks of Taka which flew off the side of the catwalk.

Ty punched his fist into the X-shaped fissure in Takas abdomen and felt something hard. Ty distantly felt the muscles of his shoulder tearing as he yanked at it, but it eventually pulled free.

Gummy black flecks stained his hand as it emerged holding something that writhed and screamed, hard gunked in the creature’s tar. Ty tossed it aside and simply resumed beating. Taka had long since ceased moving. Far below, the object was vaporized in the reactor’s protective field.

Taka’s body simply liquefied below Ty and seeped through the catwalk, but Ty continued beating at the catwalk until he felt his knuckles crack painfully.

Ty regained his senses and pain flooded into his world. His arms felt full of fishhooks and when he tried to rise from his kneeling position he nearly fainted. He left his sword on the grating where it lay – he would have to come back for it. His hand was now little more than a casing full of bone fragments.

Ty staggered drunkenly back to the room with Siona’s body. Her eyes were closed, and the pool of herself that she lay in looked too much like blood to Ty. He could do nothing but stare at her for a time before he noticed her perfect breast rising and falling with what would be breathing in a human.