South pressed her face against the gas station window, watching Mount Olympus burn in the distance like the world's most fucked up bonfire. The orange glow painted the gloomy Pacific sky in apocalyptic hues that reminded her of the Terminator 2 movie poster she'd had on her bedroom wall before the leukemia got her in 1991.

  "This is so bogus," she muttered. "So fucking bogus."

  She snapped her Nokia open and dialed North's number. There was a small chance that her sister didn’t get to the compound in time to be melted to slag.

  The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Four. Five.

  South stared at the two livestock lorry trucks filled with coffins stacked like a macabre game of Tetris. A nice collection of humans, drugged up on a cocktail of Rohypnol and ketamine, breathing through the air holes her thralls drilled with father's power tools.

  The aforementioned thirty thralls lay silent and still, filling the third livestock truck, awaiting orders, ready to burst out at a moment’s notice armed with 1920’s unregistered guns.

  "Come on, come on… Pick up, you goth bitch," South hissed, becoming worried that she was all alone now.

  On the eleventh ring, North finally answered.

  "Heeeeelllllooooo?" The voice was North's but slightly off, sounding too damn cheerful. There was something else in the background too—panting and groaning sounds?

  "North? What the fuck are you so cheery about?" South demanded. "And what's that noise?"

  "Noooothing's wrooooong!" North's voice sing-songed. "Everything is CIRCLE—I mean, everything is perfectly fiiiiine, indeed!"

  "Are your thralls having an orgy or something? Jesus Christ, North, I can hear them breathing all heavy and shit."

  "BEAR BREATHING!" the reply came. "Concealment from Scrutimancers! VERY NORMAL BEAR SOUNDS! Shhh!"

  "What?" South's eye twitched. "Whatever, I don't give a shit about your weird thrall management, dude. Have you seen this shit? Mount Olympus is totally fucked. Like, on fire fucked. Like, can-see-it-from-Highway-101 fucked."

  There was a long pause. Too long.

  "Please hold. Noooorth is thinking," North finally said. "Thinking how to escape. There is no escape. There is only NOMS."

  "Noms? What the fuck dude? Are you high? Did you snack on one of those Seattle tech bros? I told you their blood is full of microdoses and shit."

  "No eating tech bros!" North protested. "Only eating... CIRCLES! I mean... thinking! Only thinking! Think harder, idiot vegetable!”

  There was a sound of something hitting something, probably North hitting one of her thralls.

  South kicked an empty beer can across the parking lot. "Look, I don't have time for whatever mental breakdown you're having. I've got two trucks full of knocked-out college kids I nabbed from Olympic College Residence Hall this morning.”

  “South?” North voiced after a deep pause. “Why… you have two truckfulls of college kids?”

  “Grandfather wanted them for the crown ritual. Guess he didn’t tell you the deets about it. Two hundred sacrifices! Took a few hours to pack a hundred caskets into each truck with thirty three thralls."

  “Why?”

  “The fuck you mean why? The humans have to be alive when their souls get pulled out to power up the dimensional gate. Are you listening?”

  “Listening, indeed,” North replied.

  "What is wrong with you? Can you, like, stop being a weirdo for five minutes and focus? How drunk are you? Did you see what happened and decide to drown your problems in alcohol again? Is that it?”

  "Not being drunk!”

  “North,” South growled.

  “Okay… okay, confession! I am drunk North. Otherwise, very normal! Everything is... Very bad circle—I mean, very bad NEWS, indeed. Everyone at the compound… Toast! Corpse Seeker orbital strike. Big boom. Much fire. Very dead. North is sad. Having a big cry.”

  “It’s not perfect, I admit,” South chewed on her bottom lip. “That was a nice compound and we had lots of nice artifacts in there. But we can recover.”

  “Recover?”

  "God, you're such a dumbass sometimes," South said. "Like, majorly dense. We're crystalloid fungi, you drunk dipshit. The whole family consciousness is distributed through each branch. Even if their bodies got totally torched, they're still in here." She tapped her temple. "In our heads, in our blood, in every spore."

  "But... but they're melty up on pyramid geology," North protested.

  "So what? Physical death means jack shit to us. The consciousness patterns are preserved in our crystalline matrices. We’re their branches! I am more converted than you, so I can literally feel Grandfather's memories trying to surface right now, all pissy and demanding." South's voice fell to a bitter hiss. "Gramps always said that you ended up too much of an individual this time around, sis. Overall, you’re older than me, but sadly, your current conversion’s going hella slow. Not enough magical potential in that damned body of yours. Not enough ‘collective understanding’. It's why I got sent to fucking Seattle with my thralls while you went off to grab that potential mageling.”

  “Mageling?”

  “Yea,” South tapped her chin. “What was his name… uhhh? Clifford? Yeah. Did you get him? Him and his undead dog or whatever?”

  “Yes.” North answered.

  “Oh good. He can become the host body for grandfather then.”

  “Host body?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Yes, you dense goth,” South grumbled. “We need a magically potent body to start to bring grandfather back ASAP. Look, can you drive him over on the Packard to where I am?”

  “Drive over… where?”

  "Amanda Park gas station, right off 101.”

  “Yes.”

  “Aight, you better get your ass here, ASAP,” South said. “Make a thrall drive, don't crash into a tree.”

  “Okkay! Be there… soon! Don’t do anything to prisoner humans!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” South huffed. “I don’t know what the shit to do with them all. We can slice their necks and turn them into thralls together, I guess. It'll be faster with both of us. Just gotta figure out which ones are more magical so we can start to bring our family back properly.”

  “No slicing without me!”

  “Then you better get here fast, sis.”

  The eternal teenager snapped the Nokia shut and shoved it into her flannel pocket.

  Staring at the dreary smoke cloud blooming from Mount Olympus was giving South the heebie jeebies. The Omnid Scrutimancer blood-bound hounds were out there, too close for comfort, busy collecting the melted remnants of her family.

  This was fine. They’d gotten away before. They’d get away again. Again and again. An endless chase across myriads of worlds. An endless carousel of reincarnation, of new bodies, of surviving family members bringing each other back via blood.

  Now it was her turn.

  She remembered herself. Not her teenage self who died in 1991, but the eternal girl. The girl that kept running from world to world. Shifting bodies. The second grand-daughter. The smallest branch.

  South ran her fingers through her perfect blonde hair, one of the few perks of being crystalloid fungi pretending to be human. No bad hair days when your entire physical form was just a construct.

  She could feel her entire family wobbling at the edges of her consciousness, wishing to be brought back: Grandfather's fury burning brightest, Father's irritation, Mother's cold disappointment, Uncle's sardonic amusement, Cousin West’s concern. They were all there, their patterns preserved deep in the crystalline matrix that also made up her being.

  Melted physically out there in the burning valley, crystalline strata reset by the heat of a Corpse Seeker falling from orbit, but not erased, not gone. Backed up inside her. Waiting to be reborn.

  Since North ended up inhabiting a disappointment of a body, struggling to remember her past self, it was up to South to bring back the family.

  Even now, after decades, North was barely fifty percent functional as a proper crystalloid, kept sliding into human depression cycles, got drunk often and was told to go work at the Yumland market as a cashier by grandfather as punishment. South herself was somewhere around eighty percent crystalline, her individuality more of a switch that could be toggled with enough focus.

  It would be a struggle for her to bring grandfather back, would likely take years, decades if not more depending on how potent the new host was. Decades, during which she’d have to hide herself and North amidst eight billion humans from the Frontenachii sniffers.

  "Fucking Frontenachii," she spat, staring at the gloomy sky covered in sheets of rolling, drizzling clouds. “Fucking barely magical Earth.”

  The dragon assholes had obliterated a century of careful work in one orbital strike. All those empowering artifacts, the crown fragments, the dungeon with almost a century of reinforced wards forged with blood and sacrifice - poof. Gone. Just like that time MTV canceled Beavis and Butthead.

  Bring me back, Grandfather’s voice echoed in her skull. Find a suitable vessel. The Clifford boy will do. He's in his twenties, a bit too young perhaps… but I need to manage, restore the Family.

  "Yeah, yeah, I’m on it, Gramps," she said aloud.

  At least North grabbed the necromancer mageling. That was something. A start.

  Explaining things to North, especially when she was being a drunk idiot, was annoying, but that was life. In another lifetime it was North who brought South back and explained things to her.

  She pulled out a Marlboro Light and lit it with her silver lighter. The smoke curled up into the gloomy sky.

  Life was going to suck bigtime. But maybe not entirely…

  Until her grandfather returned, South was the family’s Prima. She would carefully build herself an army of thralls starting with the humans in the trucks. Grandfather clung to this dreary, slightly magical valley for far too long, obsessed with his damned Astral radio.

  Once North arrived, South would take the fleet far south, hide in the jungle, maybe take over a drug cartel or two.

  Silver lining!

  "What deviation?" Galateya demanded, rapidly arriving into the kitchen.

  Kawathra glared at Keiy. “It’s nothing.”

  “Keiy,” Galateya turned to her gun. “What’s going on?”

  “Do NOT whine to your owner about this. Galateya isn't a Datamancer!” Kawathra barked. “Network errors aren’t her prerogative. Such issues are my problem to solve, so please send me the entire report via the neural link. Also, why are you yelling?”

  “The deviation is the reason why I’m… yelling,” Keiy’s voice dropped to a more tolerable octave, the entire front of her ‘head’ dotted with red flashes that resembled a heavy blush. “My apologies, Arch-Datamancer. I’ll file the report… normally.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kawathra relaxed a bit. “See that you do.”

  Galateya looked between the bird girl and the gun who seemed to freeze, simply staring at each other.

  “You know,” she said. “As the potential future Baroness of Earth, I feel extremely uninformed about things here.”

  “It’s fine,” Kawathra looked from the gun at the dragon girl. “Just a… database deviation glitch due to the… uhhh… local Aetheric density issues. I’m resolving it. Don’t worry about it. You can't do much about it as Beta-Knight.”

  “Become Baroness first, then you can demand all the things,” Nexxali arrived in the kitchen. “I demand pasta!”

  She jabbed me. “Feed me!”

  My tablet buzzed. I glanced at the screen. North's number. I frowned.

  Why would the vampire be calling me when she was supposed to be playing bears with Shady? Did they run into a problem?

  "Excuse me a second," I said, heading upstairs. "Important call."

  Nexxali and Kawathra followed me up the stairwell like two ducklings.

  I looked at the bird and cat. “Do you mind?”

  “I want pasta!” the catgirl repeated insistently.

  “I am here to assist you with whatever you may require,” the magpie said, staring at me with a devoted expression that bordered on the obsessive. She was probably mentally constructing a thousand charts about my Emperor self.

  “Pasta later, I gotta take this call,” I waved at the Datamancer and Marshal to enter my bedroom and closed the door, picking up the call. “Hello?”

  "EMPEROR CIRCLE!" Shady yelled from the phone. "This is Princess Aquillianne! Very important Princess business! Indeed!"

  "Shady, why are you—"

  "Mushroom vegetable made TERRIBLE phone call!" she interrupted. "South wants North to bring you! For GRANDFATHER POSSESSION!"

  "What? Shady, slow down," I said, pressing the tablet closer to my ear. "What's happening with North?"

  "MUSHROOM VEGETABLE IS BEING VERY BAD!" Shady yelled. "South called! Said bring Emperor to gas station for GRANDFATHER HOSTING PARTY! Not good circle party! Bad square party!"

  Nexxali stared at me with wide, gold eyes, her large, serval ears tilted towards the phone, listening in.

  "Grandfather hosting... what?" I repeated. “I don’t understand. What grandfather? The Omnids obliterated the vampire elder with the mountain, no? Listen, can you put North on so she can tell me what’s going on herself?”

  “Not possible.”

  “Why?”

  "Bad North mushroom wanted to tell South square things with her mouth! So I CORRECTED her jaw! Now she makes only mmmmph sounds! Very educational correction! Very silent vegetable now."

  "You broke North's jaw?"

  "Only a little bit! Temporary circle! She'll heal! Mushrooms always heal! North snack on bear guts, get better later!”