The castle was not nearly as nice as imagined. The walls were thick with grime, the floor was carpeted in a black filth, and every chamber and corridor confirmed that the human spirit had long vanished. Some pale and haggard Red Devils remained, the subjects of bare survival, and fired weak spells and retreated deeper into the castle, shutting out and stranding an unlucky straggler who had been among them. She turned on Mistrial, and with a vain final effort succeeded in slapping her across the face with a bright curse-filled hand, and in turn Mistrial shoved her palm up into that wretch so hard that some pink muscular form protruded up through the neck, into the jaw, and out through the mouth, shooting the teeth off into the darkness. The slap mark smoked and sizzled across Mistrial’s face, shooting its curseload into her heart, swelling it four times its size, but her heart shot back, sending it back out as pulsing waves throughout her body that moved through her like the sudden heat of a furnace opening and closing. Blood shot from her ears and her skin turned a bright and unnatural fuschia and the ringing in her ears masked her own screams. She tore the great oak door off its hinges and tossed it aside. The architecture of the castle crazed around them in combinatorics, mapping itself out to some labyrinth of high magic trappings and Mistrial staggered through on numb legs, articulated like the final movements of an electrocution, blind to reason, screaming at a decibel unheard of by woman or man. The rescue party trailed behind her blood wake, uncertain and fearful of her. She came to the chamber with the little monkey man that bites off your fingers if you can’t solve his riddle and he capered toward her with little blue penis wagging from his pubic body, asking about eggs and pincushions, and she squeezed him like an industrial press, wringing his blood grapes out in deep wine across the flagstones. As time dragged on in the castle’s labyrinth she felt her spell start to dissipate, the weakness surged back into her, and she disgorged a strand of black bile, but otherwise carried on like a ragged automaton. The mob came round her and for either side someone took her arm up around them and carried her on. She looked up, droop-eyed and unthinking, and saw it was Kate Hex holding her, looking deep into her, though the character of that regard she could not know in the moment and could only hope to piece it together at some later date and time, maybe the next life. They walked on through the dead grey world of that place, lost, picking through its bones, worn out, when they heard a great groaning and that king of kettles, the cauldron of astaroth came trudging through on his iron feet, gurgling with a belly full of rainwater, and they knew his magic would show them the way.