As they left the cafe, Bishop demanded that Annalise explain herself.

"It's been three months," she said, "and you have not tried to unlock new magical potential. That is what we're here for, Bishop. Not to practice what we already know, but to grow." She gave him a sidelong gaze. "If you can't speak to her, then you can't."

"But what if you can?" Atticus was thrilled by the idea. "Maybe you can try to speak to Felix, too."

But the thought alone made Bishop's stomach roil. He was troubled enough by the dead as it was, without reaching in to find them. He could always feel them, waiting for him to extend his hand. They were ready to catch it, to pull themselves out of the pit he'd pushed them into. But he had never learned the right way to control them. What if he couldn't?

Being devoured by his anxiety, Bishop didn't notice they'd crossed campus until the Pantheon was looming up before him. The crowd around it was thick with contenders, Overseers and paramedics that were all warring to get to the centre of the situation. There were other students lurking nearby, like they sensed something was wrong, but their attention only ever held for a second, redirected by magic.

Bishop shoved his way through the group. They were all gathered at the bottom of the dorm building, where Harper and Daphne had been raising a rainbow of delightful flowers for months now.

The flowers were still beautiful, even if they were now a funeral bouquet. Some were crushed. Bishop noted with no small shock of grief that Daphne was lying amongst the roses, and weren't the thorns pricking her? She would be so upset, when she woke up, that her hard work had been lost to her clumsiness. She had fallen upon, and crumpled, her precious bed of flora.

But there were ants in her eyelids and bees scampering the track of her throat like they were searching for a pocket to pollinate. Her hair was in disarray. Her lips were parted, forming a heart-shaped window between them to teeth tipped with charcoal. She was unseemly. She would not care about her flower bed being crumpled. There was no part left of her to care. Nothing left of her at all.

"How did this happen?" Bishop demanded.

"Harper found her." Bodhi had her arms wrapped around Harper, who was trembling viciously in Bodhi's hold, her sobs wretched. From some feet away, Noah looked on, glassy-eyed, perhaps seeing his own petrified response to finding Felix reflected in Harper's distraught. She was wholly inconsolable. Bodhi went on, "Daphne had been dead for hours by that point. In the garden."

"Like Felix in the water," Bishop heard Atticus murmur beside him. "They both died in their own element."

Bishop knew that right then, all of his gathered friends who had suspicions about the Third Overseer were filing more pieces together in their heads. An Overseer knew the power of every contender. An Overseer would know how to turn such power against itself. How to incite concave turmoil and destroy the life it resided in.

Bishop did not want to stand over her body, beg for his dark power to revitalise her mind, and to then crawl inside it. He did not want to ask anything of Daphne's tortured soul. Could she not just rest here, amongst her flowers, and be left to her timeless slumber?

But eyes were turning on Bishop, expectant. Annalise had made a promise on his behalf, and so he had all their hopes to uphold.

Bishop met the eyes of the First Overseer over his shoulder, and was given a sombre nod to proceed. Bishop did not let himself look to where the Third Overseer lurked distantly with the paramedics. What lies was he feeding them? What kind of tragic calamity was he twisting Daphne's death into, while the contenders had reason to believe he was the one behind it?

Bishop reached in for his magic and found it already there, waiting with its claws nestled in the pit of his stomach. Now it climbed inside his chest and rested there, barbed tail poised above his beating heart, waiting for any misstep on his part, any reason to turn itself against him. He was forever at the whims of his magic, indebted to it for the lifelong gift it had granted him in power. For this, every time he drew on it, it reminded him of their eternal and callous covenant. To each other they were bound and so to each other they were enslaved.

Kneel, urged Bishop's magic, and so he knelt. He knelt beside Daphne's destroyed body and felt his magic jump to recalibrate its position as his heart began to race.

Find me. He took Daphne's hand.

Find me, it pleaded again, and so Bishop said a silent farewell to the living world and plunged into whatever sick underside it had to offer.

Bishop had shut his eyes and was offering himself to the dead, now, but he could hear movement from the world where his body rested. Annalise, ushering people out of the way to give Bishop space, give him space, let him find Daphne, but don't go so far you'll be unable to pull him out if she tries to trap him in there.

Bishop supposed this was the benefit to being surrounded by other magical people. They knew that sometimes their own power did not want to let them go.

But eventually, all sounds from the outside world faded and his senses deadened entirely, leaving Bishop to the emptiness of his own mind.

The thing that most people did not understand was that everybody went to Hell when they died. There were no golden clouds and no winged cherubs and certainly no sole God, unless Bishop counted. Death was always a punishment. There was no salvation, no joy to be found after life.

It was just this darkness, eternal and unforgiving. It greeted Bishop with a certain disdain, like it recognised him and yet regarded him as an invader. He was not dead, after all, only half; forever he'd be granted access to this place, but that did not mean he was welcome.

He did not come here often.

Sometimes, when he depleted his magic, he fell into this realm by accident. It blanketed his fatigued body and tried to comfort him, revitalise him. When he came here intentionally, it was different. There was no comfort. There was no energy to be found in pockets or corners. There was just darkness and, if he waited long enough for them to arrive, the dead.

"Daphne?" he called into the blackness. His voice was swallowed by the greatness of the space and was not given back to him. He wondered if he'd spoken at all.

Bishop crept further into the darkness, feeling around as he went, worried he might trip over something submerged in the watery emptiness or something dangling from the ceiling. He ought to know better, though. There was no floor, here. No walls and no ceiling. He was the only solid, certain thing in this plane.

As he pushed through it, though, unsure if he was actually moving at all, a pressure was building from within him, tightening on all sides. He felt like he was about to burst into golden dust and be gone forever, but soon the pressure stopped increasing and rested as it was. It just remained. It was a feeling like being watched. Needletips of darkness rested along his skin. His vision faltered every few steps, at least he thought it did; he could not really tell if his eyesight was fading when there was nothing to see.

"Daphne?" This time, Bishop was sure he felt the word form on his lips, his tongue, but again he heard nothing.

And then the sky ruptured,

or the ground,

or maybe nothing burst at all and Bishop had been falling all along. But suddenly he was aware of it, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. His limbs were flailing, but he couldn't see them. He was tumbling with nothing but the vague idea of how it had happened, a fissure having opened suddenly in the ground beneath him and deposited him into the perpetual pit below. There was no wind, no light. His hair didn't billow about his head, his clothes didn't flap around his body. He worried his body was all gone. Maybe all that was left of Bishop Butler now was only a distant idea – he was just a concept of himself, of who he had been.

And there was Daphne.

"Edith?" Bishop said.

(He had stopped falling. Or had never been falling to begin with).

Because yes, it was not Daphne at all, but Bishop's sister.

She was lying in a puddle. Though there was no light in the room, something must have illuminated the water from within, because it shone silver against Edith's broken form. Her eyes were on Bishop, but she was not moving, not breathing.,

Bishop tried to stagger towards her, but she grew no closer. He pushed himself into a sprint, racing against the darkness, but Edith was still out of reach.

"Edie." He felt his voice fracture like a bone in his throat, but didn't hear it.

Edith did, though. She lifted her grey head and located Bishop with her rolling marble eyes. Bishop was seized by repulsed fright: though her head rose, none of the rest of her body did, and it gave her a distinctly insectile quality.

You are not supposed to be here.

Her voice was everywhere. She was this very realm.

"I came to find you," said Bishop noiselessly. It only became true when he'd said it. He'd promised to search this place for Daphne, but his mind had been reaching for his sister, and so he had found her.

You must leave, begged Edith tonelessly. You'll be eaten alive.

At that moment, other faces started to appear. They were stitched into the fabric that was this black world. They were grinning maniacally, until Bishop looked too long and they were weeping. Their expressions never changed, only Bishop's comprehension of them.

He knew these faces.

(He didn't).

Everything was wrong.

Edith laid her head back down and returned to resting, effectively feeding her brother to her macabre empire.

Everything came at Bishop suddenly. The faces in the darkness grew bodies, grotesque things half-eaten by worms and soil. They advanced on him in the way of ghosts. Their bodies did not move but suddenly they were closer, as if the imaginary air had propelled them. There was no temperature here, either, and yet Bishop felt chills explode along his skin as the dead closed in on him.

Heed us, Keeper, intoned the dead. You called for us, and yet you are arrested by your fear. Embrace us.

Bishop started to shiver as the dead pooled nearer, vanishing Edith from view. He didn't know what happened next; he had never handed himself over like this to his magic. Did the dead want to comfort him, hurt him?

Bishop tried one last time. "Daph–"

"Her name was Edie. Edith."

Bishop was interrupted by his own voice.

He staggered backwards. Even the dead faltered. In this noiseless realm, there was Bishop's voice, from an apparently non-existent place in the unforeseeable distance. Bishop's eyes darted around the blackness, up and down and to every side, but he couldn't locate his other self, if that's what this was.

Another voice arrived. "And how did you say she died?"

Bishop again. "The thirteen. The contenders. They killed her."

Bishop understood now. The voice, echoing around this nothing-space, was his own from a memory. It was younger, more fragile. He was talking to one psychologist or another, shortly after Edith's death. He had tried talking to many non-magical people before it occurred to him that none of them would listen. None of them knew how to listen. To them, the Trial was some ridiculous coping mechanism that Bishop had constructed around his sister's untimely demise to make it bearable for himself. To convince himself she died for a purpose.

But now he was here, too. He wished he could show them that.

I am here. This is where I will die, too. And when both of the Butler children are lost to this cold place, what will become of your comforting lies?

Bishop's voice continued overhead, but it was not just one memory anymore. It was so many, overlapping and tangling like loose threads. There were arguments with Edith, the inconsequential condolences of friends, the late-night muttering of poetry to himself. His own words always had been the only things capable of turning a lament into something divine.

And there was Daphne.

She was amongst the crowd of the dead, not half as decayed as the rest of them, a thriving rose in a bed of thorns. She could have been an angel, blonde hair pooling over her shoulder, her eyes glistening with just-gone life.

The dead kept coming, smiling Daphne amongst them. Bishop tried to race towards her, but again he was unable to advance. How was it that the dead could crawl towards him, but he was prohibited from moving at all?

"Daphne," Bishop called out, his voice lost to the atmosphere, though he hoped Daphne heard it.

This was a place famished of words, of stories, of emotion. He could not blame the walls, wherever they were, for stealing his voice as its own.

Daphne looked up at him, her skin dazzling like a million radiant gems. She gazed right at Bishop, and for a moment he could not look away, not even if he tried.

And then he could. He turned his head, and there was Daphne, again.

Turned it again, and there was Daphne. Daphne. Everywhere Bishop looked, there was Daphne. The dead were all wearing her face.

The flock of little goddesses were nearly upon Bishop, and he had no idea what to do with them but fight. They were already dead. Could he hurt Daphne any more than she had been hurt already?

So Bishop drew on his magic, and the dead came faster. He pulled darkness from this world and let it wreath about his fingertips, writhing and snapping. As if they had not eaten in weeks and Bishop was the first sign of food they'd had in all this time, the hundreds of Daphnes threw themselves at him, clattering against one another and tipping like toy soldiers as they came.

Bishop tried to stumble back but added no extra distance between him and the pursuers. He hurled his magic at them, for it was all he could think to do. Black sparks hit the dead's white flesh and dispersed on it like tiny corroded freckles, and once they dissolved, the dead came stronger, faster.

Bishop realised only after he'd struck so many of the ghouls that he was helping them. He was a thing of this diseased realm and so was his magic. Anything he did to defend himself would only aid the dead. They were his power. He could not use them against themselves.

Bishop thought there might be nothing left to do but cower and accept his fate when something began to change.

The sky was fading in and out of view.

Outside noise was seeping into this crooked world. Muffled shouts. Bishop's name.

Familiar faces were appearing in the crowd.

Amongst the too-many iterations of Daphne, there was Atticus. There was Annalise, Zion, Noah. There was Maddox, off to the side, their hands twisted like they were performing a spell.

Bishop had a terrible fear then that maybe Maddox was casting, and what he was witnessing here was the future. A future. His friends in the world of the dead, an inexplicable hatred for him in their withered hearts.

The contenders descended upon Bishop. The sky fell away and he was in darkness again, with only a pack of Ceres' and his friends racing at him with no will but for violence.

Everything was ending.

Bishop knew this. He wondered what he'd become after death. What he'd be in the memories of all the people he'd met and hated.

Bishop Butler was going to die in the world of the dead.

"Bishop!" screamed Annalise.

Bishop hurled a spear of darkness at her, and it struck her in the chest. The dead surged towards her, skidding as they readjusted their trajectory. They were no longer after Bishop. Annalise turned on Bishop's rotting army in terror, and Bishop hesitated – but this wasn't real. This was not his Annalise, and so he could not hurt her.

But her screams were chilling as she went down like a seashell beneath the froth of dirty waves.

Stilled momentarily by the sight of Annalise disappearing beneath the dead, Zion and Bodhi, who had joined her brother in the chase now, skidded to the side and caught one another's sleeves. Their attention wavered only momentarily before they were off again, sprinting at Bishop. Zion's footsteps were thunderous and Bodhi's calculated as they approached him.

Bishop wasn't waiting for them to get any closer. Typically when he used his magic, he sapped it quickly and his energy would be diminished for hours. It was nothing like that, now. Darkness was eager at his fingertips, clawing for access, for freedom. It felt impossible that he might run out of it.

Bishop hardly had to lift his arms for the twins to go flying backwards, flailing against one another. They hit some imaginary wall and their bodies broke, and they slid to the invisible ground in synchrony. They did not move again.

Harper and Freya came next, and then Chase. From Freya's back sprouted the most spectacular wings. She looked out of place here, a dove swooping down from Heaven, but Bishop was not thrown off by her magnificence. He dispatched the girls with the same careless motion as he had the twins. Chase was more prepared, though. He came at Bishop from an angle and feinted right when Bishop went left. Chase had to have been using his magic, because Bishop could only see a blurred outline of him, and every time Chase was there in Bishop's peripheral vision, he was not there when Bishop turned to look.

Bishop swerved Chase's flying fist, but Chase's leg was there to meet him. Chase's booted foot snagged Bishop deep in the ribs and, spluttering, Bishop went down.

As he lay gasping on the floor, Bishop asked himself how the dead could replicate the contenders' powers so superbly as their faces, but did not let himself believe in any other possibility. This was not real.

Bishop started to push himself to his feet, but he was suddenly caught in a net of what felt like thorns. Snarling, he tossed his gaze over his shoulder and there was Harper, holding her fragile magic in place as she lay crumpled metres away.

Bishop wrenched his arm harshly upwards. He felt thorns slicing flesh away from bone, but where pain should have been, there was only searing fury. Darkness exploded from his palms and Harper shrieked as it struck her. Her back arched grotesquely as her ribs craned upward against her chest, straining against her skin. Before she could right herself, corpses were upon her, animated by Bishop's fluctuating tenacity.

Just then there was a ringing crack in Bishop's head, and he was blind. Chase had driven his foot into the back of Bishops skull, rendering him immobile for several long, terrifying seconds. As if through a kaleidoscope, Bishop saw the world tilting as Chase attempted to scoop Bishop's limp body into his arms. Bishop twitched, trying to fight, but then noticed Chase's face. There was only despair and concern there as he carried Bishop across the dark plane, no malice.

But as soon as Bishop regained feeling, he threw himself down from Chase's hold, fastened his fingers about Chase's ankles, and wrenched them from under him. Chase whimpered as he went down but, once he hit the floor, was silent.

The world trembled.

There was a second where everything was golden.

It felt as though the world finally wakened at that cue, like a dormant volcano blinking open its bleary eyes after millennia.

Jupiter, King of Gods, monarch of the sky, had arrived.

Today would be the day, Bishop supposed, that the future as it existed in his mind would fossilise, and he would be returned to dust.

Noah was standing in the centre of the world, his hand outstretched towards the sky, radiating electric, golden light, his hair swirling around his head like a halo. He was a shimmering, resplendent replica of heaven itself. This was to say that he was a storm.

Death is not so dark after all, mused Bishop as he charged towards it.

The world of the dead was coming apart in the hands of the living. Light was coming through in spears, as if Bishop and the others were in a cardboard box and somebody was poking holes through it with a needle, letting the yellow rays in. The shadows were hesitating as if aware of themselves and the danger that the sunlight posed to them. The dead were indifferent. They went on slaughtering.

Knots of grass were forming around Bishop's feet as he ran, threatening to trip him. There was the warped screech of overhead birds. He could see storm clouds gathering in the world above this one. He could hear their anger building, the wind picking up.

The seams between worlds were tearing. Life and death were bleeding into one another.

There was an ending up ahead. Behind the wispy curtains that remained of this dark province, there was a finale.

Before he could reach Noah, something barrelled into Bishop, sending him sprawling to the ground. There was a weight on top of him, but nobody there.

Atticus.

Manipulation of light, as Atticus had once explained, was manipulation of what people saw – or, more importantly, didn't see. But by making himself invisible, Atticus also forfeited his own ability to see.

Bishop performed it all in one swift movement: he flung his arms around Atticus's invisible form to bind him in place and then snapped his head upward, cracking it against Atticus's own.

Atticus flickered back into sight.

"Get off me!" Bishop snarled, his words sounding in stops and starts.

Atticus writhed on top of Bishop, trying to lift his arms, land a disabling hit on Bishop. "Bishop, stop it!"

"You're not real." Bishop dug his fingers into Atticus's shoulder and heaved him sideways. They tumbled, kicking and thrashing, until Bishop was on top. He slammed Atticus down and heard Atticus's head meet an imaginary floor with enough force to stun him. It was all too familiar to their first fight, when Atticus had lunged, invisible, onto Bishop and had been ensnared in the vicious and sinister tapestry of Bishop's magic moments later.

Just like Bishop had that day, he now drove his thumbs into Atticus's windpipe and dug deep. This time, he wasn't worried that he might kill Atticus. He needed to. Murdering all of his imaginary friends might be the only way he could free himself from this monstrous realm.

Atticus screamed until he didn't have the breath to continue anymore. He raked at the air in desperation, but Bishop twisted his magic into a pair of shadowy spears and plunged them through Atticus's palms. Pointed and cold as metal, they pierced flesh and bone and then soil – sometimes soil, sometimes nothing – and pinned Atticus's hands in a doleful surrender.

Atticus's body jerked beneath Bishop's. When he tried to pull his hands away, his flesh tore and blood beaded, but they remained pegged to the ground. Atticus's face contorted in a scream, but it was soundless, and when his teeth snapped shut on his lip, it dyed his teeth red.

Atticus bucked, trying to jostle Bishop off, but his attempts became weaker and weaker. Finally he had nothing left and his head lolled against the mud.

It had begun to rain.

There was a flicker of movement in the corner of Bishop's vision. For half a second, his grip on Atticus's neck loosened and he surveyed his surroundings.

It was not much, but it was enough for Atticus.

Bishop realised too late what Atticus was doing, and before he could flounder back into place, Atticus was freeing himself. It must have been excruciating; Atticus twisted his impaled hands so that his fingers were wrapped around the shadowy poles. In a searing shock of light, Atticus's frail magic was alive again – just enough to burn away the spears that had been pinning him.

He wasted no time. Breathless and savage, Atticus took hold of Bishop's face and started tearing at it. To Atticus, Bishop was not Bishop anymore, just as Atticus was unreal to Bishop. There was no telling, in this realm, what was true and what wasn't. The only things that belonged here were the pained things and the rotting things.

Bishop cried out, trying to wrench free, but Atticus was clinging. His nails were scraping against Bishop's face, bruising flesh and shredding it. Bishop felt the soft skin of his under-eyes, cheeks, lips, tearing like dough beneath Atticus's fingers. Atticus's knee connected with Bishop's stomach, winding him so that he couldn't react. When Bishop stopped, Atticus stopped, but it did not last – as soon as he had feeling again, Bishop was tangling his fists in Atticus's hair, lifting Atticus's head—

Bishop was about to slam Atticus's head down, carve it apart on the hard ground, when suddenly he lost his grip entirely, and he was in the air.

A scream built in Bishop's throat but did not quite claw its way up, for he lost his breath all at once. As if he were attached to a fishing hook and the sky was reeling him upward, Bishop was flung into the air.

And the world came back to him.

Everything came back to him. Vivid and terrible.

Everything, everyone, was destroyed.

The world of the dead and Bishop's rotting disciples vanished all together. Bishop's body sagged as his magical anchor was suddenly ungrounded. His power and his energy blinked out. He was outside the dorms again, by the garden where he had first knelt by Daphne's body to reach in for her, though that must have been thousands of years ago. From where he was suspended motionlessly in the air, he could see the disarray. The garden and the stretch of grass around the building was entirely blackened. The paramedics lay slumped together, not one of them breathing.

And the contenders.

They were all over the place, like a child's discarded toys. Zion and Bodhi, struggling to sit up. Freya and Harper, slumped against one another, unmoving, Harper's shirtfront drenched with blood. Annalise lay with her face pressed into the soil. Bishop could not think of anything she would have hated more.

So why was she lying like that? Why would she not stand, brush the dirt from her cheeks, make some smart remark about how unfair it was that her new clothes had been stained?

Maddox was looking on in stunned silence. Hope, a distance away, standing perfectly still, watching, like he had been the whole time.

Atticus. Throat bruised, hands torn open, blinking up at the grey sky, otherwise paralysed.

And Noah, standing in the centre of the chaos, his hands lifted. He was holding Bishop in place. Around him, a storm roiled, lightning cracking far away, rain coming in slanted, freezing sheets. He had cast a grey blanket over the world. He was Jupiter.

I did this. Bishop had never felt more like a god than he did right then, peering down from the sky upon the destruction he'd caused. He had never felt worse.

"Noah–" Bishop started, but his voice failed him, and it would not have mattered. As soon as he opened his mouth, Noah's face scrunched up, his teeth flashed, and a current of electricity racked Bishop's body. Bishop grunted against the shock, only realising then that he was being held in place by fine electrical fibres, like little threads of lightning. When he kicked, they tightened and shocked him. His head fell back against the storm. His face was slick with blood, and now it was pooling through his clothing, Noah's magic cutting into Bishop's skin like hot wires.

Bishop knew he would die here.

Part of him sighed with relief. The other half surged in defiance.

The shining golden threads around his body cut deeper.

Bishop had absolutely nothing left.

But nothing was all he needed. It was all he'd ever had.

In one final incandescent stand, Bishop let his darkness eat away at the golden cords restraining him, threw his hands high about his head as if in fraught prayer, and severed the sky with shadow.

It was a celestial display, the storm cleaving apart to reveal the beginnings of nighttime. The darkness arced downwards from the storm, right for the source of it. Noah lurched into motion, but there was no time to flee, and so he shot an aimless bolt of crackling aureate energy.

A sky-borne seraph and an earth-bound, cherished golden thing, locked in battle. Once they'd released their magic, their very own lives were out of their hands.

The darkness, thin and sharp as a blade, struck Noah directly across the face, and he went down with an animal cry, his face in his hands, the blood everywhere.

Noah's own blow hit Bishop in the chest.

I die today after all, Bishop resolved, and there was relief in this confidence.

Noah's bullet of raw energy buried itself deep in Bishop's chest, and he was sent hurtling backwards. His back hit the dormitory wall and his head, the window; it shattered and rained like crystal around his body as he fell.

The world fragmented, and he was out even beforehe hit the ground.