Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The Nightmare's demon conductor chooses to die on the bomb-run — remembering the children the system stole from her across a thousand lifetimes.
Fire Brandy's arc ends in a devastating choice. When Carl comes to evacuate her and her young before ramming the Nightmare into the abyss, she refuses: she and Tizquick have decided to ride the train to their deaths. Talking with Tizquick woke her memory — she's done this before, in a boat's boiler, in a castle's heating system, each time bearing children (this time three) she secretly named against the rules, each time having them taken and never returned.
She will not be used this way again. Grasping at last that the crawl is a construction, she tells Carl they should not be enemies in this and that he must help her kind. She dies as the bomb-train hits the pit — a mother ending her own exploitation.
Carl grieves her and Tizquick as kindred victims.
A demon woman wreathed in sheol fire, leaning from the Nightmare's cockpit, sorrowful and resolved, cradling three newborn fiery young.
The Nightmare's demon conductor, who chooses death over another cycle of having her children stolen.
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