If Sienna felt the pain as the consequence of having torn her own vessel open to summon the Unfinished Children to crack a Lesser God Witch’s cage, that admission implied a counterfactual — a self in which she had not done it, a self that retrospectively wished she hadn’t.

She refused that self.

She refused its existence, even the courtesy of considering it.

The mission had been hers, the decision had been hers and so was the cost of it all.

She would do it again, if asked.

Was that strange? Because she would do it again if not asked.

The reason she had been willing to trade the slow tearing of her own skin for the completion of the mission —

That was hers; it was her secret.

So the pain would not be permitted to write itself across her face. She had spent seventeen years perfecting the art of wearing a mortal mask over an immortal furnace; she would not let some leaking seam and a few cracked ribs undo the performance now.

The counterfactual self was a bad investment, a version of her that paid full price for power instead of looting the abyss on credit — and Sienna did not do refunds.

The cabin reached at the tallest floor where all their penthouses were situated and the doors slid open, leaking out the Nether Energy that had been contained in the cabin.

There was nothing she could so about that.

Sienna stepped out into the long Empyrean-blue carpeted hallway with the unhurried grace like she had nothing pressing to attend to and had decided, with mild diffidence, to retire to her suite for a quiet hour before lunch.

She walked with perfect stride; her shoulders were level. Her cracked body leaking into the hallway endlessly creating an all-consuming fog that threatened to consume the entire floor.

There were perhaps fourteen seconds of corridor between the lift and the door of her suite. She walked them at the precise unhurried pace.

She did not hurry or slow.

The leaking energy burned against her skin like lava laced, each step sending fresh spiderwebs of agony up her body, each step cracking her feet even more and her legs threating to open wider cracks and wobble, while the dark dress drank some of the evidence like a loyal accomplice.

By the time she arrived at the door, the entire floor was a cloud of impenetrable Nether Energy, she hurriedly pressed the keycard against the panel. The lock chimed, the door opened, before she stepped inside. The door closed behind her. The lock chimed again as if sealing her again in a container she was likely to die in.

And every doctrinal arrangement of her composure released all at once.

The Nether Goddess composure dropped from her face like a dropped towel, while the cracked body gave out, at last, the strain her body had been holding since she had stepped into the lift.

She made it three steps into the suite’s entry foyer before her entire front body crack opened from her chest to her stomach tearing her dress too in a violent splitting wrench, then it spread to her forearm that ripped the skin from her elbow to her wrist in a single screaming line of luminous black-violet rupture.

The third, fourth, and fifth cracks arrived like an uninvited orchestra tuning up inside her bones — the clavicle splitting with a sound like ancient ice calving, while her chest yawned open in a jagged lightning bolt of agony.

A long diagonal tear from breast to hipbone unzipping her cream dress spread further and the flesh beneath it with the casual efficiency of the universe deciding the mortal joke had run long enough.

She bit her tongue hard enough to taste copper and still made no sound, because even now, alone, the doctrine held: pain was information, and she would not give the void the satisfaction of hearing her scream.

She did not make a sound.

Another crack opened along her clavicle. The seventh across her chest once again.

Another long jagged tear that opened diagonally from the underside of her right breast across her ribcage to her hipbone right next to the first one and split yet again her cream dress open and revealed more beneath the dress, beneath the skin that had been beneath the dress, not flesh.

It was not blood or any human anatomy as known but; three seams in reality.

Like three vertical huge tears in the fabric of the world itself, running along the length of her ribcage, leaking a slow patient column of pure Nether Energy that climbed upward from the seam in lazy black-violet ribbons and dispersed into the suite’s recycled air with the unhurried confidence of something that did not consider itself to be merely escaping.

The seams pulsed. Once. Twice.

Inside them — visible, briefly, through the tears in her own ribcage — something shifted.

But it was no flesh or organ for that matter.

Something larger than the body it was contained in, folded into a geometry the body could not, by mortal physics, hold. A coiled mass of patient cosmic dark that had been waiting, since the day the goddess’s fragments had been dispersed seventeen years ago, to be given permission to occupy the body it belonged to.

It stirred now with the slow, terrible patience of an ancient tenant finally testing the locks on its too-small apartment, the abyssal geometry unfolding in lazy, hungry loops that made the air itself flinch. It was not yet permitted.

The body was not ready.

But for a single dilated heartbeat in the foyer of her penthouse, the goddess was visible in the seams of her own seventeen-year-old skin — and the suite knew it, because the air in the suite went briefly so cold that the recycled atmosphere pricked into a sheen of instant frost across the foyer’s mirror, and the suite’s mirrored wall cracked from corner to corner with a single small sympathetic pop, and somewhere on the floor below them a sleeping baby in a guest suite woke up screaming for reasons her parents would never be able to explain.

Sienna’s knees buckled.

She caught herself, briefly, against the wall — her cracked hand slamming against the wallpaper, her brow pressed against the cool surface, her breath coming short and shallow now because the body was beginning, finally, to register that the goddess had asked too much of it.

Cracks after cracks on her body increased, across the back of her neck that opened her hairline in a long luminous slash, the spiderwebbing cracks down her thigh like the universe autographing its handiwork in black-violet ink.

Her cream dress was already ruined.

The skin beneath it was unmaking.

The seams along her ribcage widened by another quarter-inch and the column of Nether Energy climbing from it doubled in volume, the coiled mass inside pressing outward with the lazy curiosity of something that had waited seventeen years for this exact moment and was in no particular hurry to ruin the surprise.

She forced one foot in front of the other and crossed the foyer, she managed to reach the door of her bedroom after so much effort — her shared bedroom, the door closed because Victoria was thankfully still down at the spa with everyone and would not be back for at least another two hours, a logistical gift Sienna had calculated yesterday and arranged for today.

The ultimate teen-girl cover story: "Don’t come in, I’m having a perfectly normal divine nervous breakdown behind this locked door while the abyss redecorates my ribcage."

The deadbolt turned with a click that sounded, in her fading hearing, like the universe signing off on her overtime request.

She pushed the door open. Stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Reached, with her uncracked hand, for the small inner deadbolt and turned it. Locked.

And then, finally, alone — the goddess’s body unobserved, the cosmic doctrine of pain-without-regret no longer requiring composure for any audience including her own —

... Sienna... fell.

Her knees gave out beneath her.

Her shoulder hit the carpeted floor first. Her cheek pressed against the cream wool while her cracked body splayed outward. Her ribcage seams, no longer constrained by the discipline of standing upright, they opened another inch and released a slow plume of Nether Energy that drifted upward toward the suite’s ceiling and dispersed in the recessed lighting like ink dropped into clear water.

Her vision dimmed like the house lights going down on the worst comedy show in Paradise — the laughter of the void echoing in her fading ears, the coiled mass inside her seam pulsing with what might have been cosmic amusement at the sight of its host finally clocking out.

Her seventeen-year-old body, which had been carrying the goddess for seventeen years and had been doing so in the full doctrinal silence of her bearing for all of those years, finally and at last let go — the dignity of a puppet whose strings had been cut by an overworked stagehand.

Her hearing distanced itself, the suite’s gentle ambient hum fading to a velvety nothing.

But before consciousness departed, Sienna’s lips moved one last time — not in pain, not in protest, not in regret, but in a small unhurried command—

"Soul Realm."

The word left her; dry, ancient, faintly amused.

Her body, broken and leaking, remained where it had fallen on the cream wool.

The goddess inside it stepped, briefly and at last, out.