20

After watching those flies follow the Bane, walking through a normal convenience store centers you. But it's hard not to notice the shared spiritual energy of the writhing, bleeding horse-thing and this antiseptic environment. The stain here is more subtle, but as your consciousness expands again from the tunnel-vision focus you needed in the battle, you can almost feel the Wyrm's tendrils spread through this place. This is an exit point, where effluent sprays into the minds and bloodstreams of helpless, clueless humans: a Clear Channel radio station playing smooth-as-paste R&B, rows of gleaming Monster Energy Drinks and Nitro Cold Brews, those little rolling hot dogs.

But where are the extraction pits, where the Wyrm's human servants rip Gaia to pieces and transform her into corruption? You can feel them, too: pipelines across the dying landscape, agricultural migrants laboring for starvation wages, great holes in the earth…

People are avoiding you. So much for spiritual balance; some woman just edged around you to get back to her truck, fist tight around her keys. What kind of spiritual center will you ever be able to find if the truth of the world always fills you with monstrous, murderous Rage?

You need to get away from this styrofoam prison and return to what remains of the living world. You step outside and the ice-wind hits you as you cross the parking lot. But then you spot movement on the far side of the lot, where a bunch of semis are parked.

Black Tarn darts between two trucks, still in the form of a huge wolf. She freezes, bewildered, as if she's never seen a parking lot before, never seen the normal world of signs and maps. Then Scarper appears, dragging what at first glance looks like a huge black plastic trash bag with someone in it. Did they bag another monster? But then you recognize the screams and growls coming from the thing Scarper is dragging: it's Clay. A moment later, you realize that it's not a trash bag at all. It's Clay's flesh, shifting and sloughing off, leaving a trail of black filth between the semis.

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