Luther screamed on the cross as the fires of Hell raged about him. Demons howled in wicked delight and stabbed him about his stomach and ribs with their barbed tridents. The fire lapped up at his blistering flesh as a rain of pure acid showered down from the stormy sky, searing its way into his open wounds. He begged for an end to the pain, but God only laughed: a roll of thunder above, a roar of pure hate as the One watching reveled in his pain.

Winged, black, vampire-things clung to his body like leeches, piercing his veins with their fangs and sucking his blood. Once sated, the black succubi flapped off across the stygian plains to the dark, turreted fortress on the hill above. As they neared the black turrets, the dragon appeared. The fiery-eyed monster, armored in spiny black scales, reared its terrible head above the castle's battlements. The blood-fattened vampires were caught by the dragon's long, lashing tongue, like flies snared by a frog, and pulled into the beast's immense, fanged maw.

"No mercy, God?" cried Luther into the raging storms of acid and fire.

The demons howled with laughter, the roll of thunder growing louder and angrier.

Why was God doing this to him, he wondered? Yeah, he'd been bad sometimes, stolen and all that. But, God didn't care that much about a few stolen bits of property, did He? Luther had gone to church… Well, when he'd had the time, when his boys didn't need him. Yeah, they'd hurt a few people; even cut a few who wouldn't let go of their precious money. And, yeah, they'd capped a few fools who'd tried to take what was theirs. And, Luther had gone along with them. Well, why not? They were his boys. He hadn't had anybody else to look out for him.

Was it that last day, the day he and his boy Andre had tried something none of the others had had the guts to do?

They'd crawled through the sewage tunnels into the closed community, the one under the glass dome at the bottom of the bay, where only the rich people could afford to live, and nobody else could get in to do any scores. It had stunk in those tunnels—they'd almost passed out halfway through. But, they'd made it, and climbed through a service hatch into the rich people's underwater city.

When he'd been a little kid, Luther's teacher had gotten him books with pictures of the underwater cities, the ones way down on the floor of the ocean. He'd remembered how beautiful it had all looked: people in deep-ocean air suits walking about the brightly colored underwater coral reefs, among the multi-colored fish and weird, spider-like crustaceans. He'd always wanted to go there. Anywhere to get away from his mom's boyfriend, and the things he'd started doing to Luther after his dad took off.

Luther and Andre had broken into one of the fancy houses down there. They'd been cleaning out the silver and the stereos, their mouths watering; thinking about what the rest of the boys would say when they came back with all this. That's when the lights had come on, and the lady of the house had walked in carrying a gun and looking like she was scared out of her wits.

Luther had run toward the window, but that stupid punk Andre had either frozen, or turned to draw his gun—Luther couldn't tell which with his back turned. Either way, he'd heard the shots and turned. That woman had just kept shooting and shooting like she couldn't stop. She was killing Andre. He'd had to shoot her.

It turned out later that Andre had already been dead, and her gun empty, when Luther shot and killed her.

The sentence was mandatory: death by lethal injection. He'd expected that. He'd prayed as they strapped that needle to his arm and attached all that electrical stuff to his head. The last thing he'd seen was this big corporate logo on the wall: VS Virtual Sentencing — A Division of Garrison Prisons, Inc. And, the slogan just below it: Justice isn't just your dream, anymore. It's our virtual reality.

He'd asked for forgiveness. He hadn't meant to kill that woman. God had to know that; He knew everything, He was God. So, why was Luther here?

"You hate me that much, God?" he screamed through the pain. "You don't want me in Heaven? Fine. Just kill me, then. Tear my soul to pieces and throw it into the wind. Or, let me float in nothingness, alone forever. I don't care. Just end this damned pain! They say you're about mercy and forgiveness. Where's your mercy now?"

A man's voice roared out of the sky, making the demons tremble.

Where was your mercy when you killed her, you damnable piece of filth?

"I was stupid. I didn't mean to—"

Burn in Hell with your damned excuses!

The lightning cracked and the fires roared. He dimly remembered his grandma reading him passages about Jesus redeeming the sinners, and he screamed in anger, realizing it had all been a lie. It was then that he heard the sound. As he turned toward it, his eyes, accustomed to the half-darkness of Hell, were stung by a radiant light.

Riders were approaching, angels in shining silver raiment astride mighty horses with flowing flaxen manes, their silver-shod hoofs sparking against stone. There were three of them, two boys—one a tall, handsome youth, the other a child—and a young woman with long, red-golden hair and sparkling emerald eyes, leading them. They all looked oddly familiar.

Then, Luther realized they resembled the three children of the woman he'd killed. He remembered them glaring at him from the spectators' section during the trial, and again through the plate glass window looking into his execution chamber. The demons cursed and shrieked at them, gesturing hatefully with their tridents, demanding that the interlopers depart. But the riders kept advancing toward Luther's crucifix, the demons retreating before their light. The acid rains spattered away to nothing, like a storm dwindling to steam as the clouds parted for the sun.

"Have you forgiven me, God?" he implored the heavens. "Have you sent your angels for me?"

The man's voice roared down in anger from the sky, the darkness closing in again as lightning crashed.

How dare you interfere? it demanded. Hell is his prison, for as long as I exist! I will have my revenge!

The acid rains fell again, but the three riders circled Luther's cross, their light forming a sphere of protective energy around him, preventing the rain from touching him.

What was happening? Luther wondered. God at odds with His own angels? Nothing like that had ever happened in the stories his grandma had told him.

The three riders held up crystals of bright sapphire, focusing the light into three precise beams that burned through the wood of Luther's cross, like Luther had used a magnifying glass as a child to catch the sun's rays and burn paper.

As the wood of the cross creaked and shattered, Luther felt himself falling, but the field of light bore him up, carrying him midair between the three riders. They started back the way they had come, across the burning fields of brimstone. Lightning crashed down, fiercer than ever, and shattered the stones before them with a deafening explosion, as though warning them to go no further.

Up on the castle battlements far above, the dragon roared forth with greater fury than Luther had ever heard before. Its great, black, leathery wings spread out across the lightning-wracked sky, its eyes and mouth blazing bright crimson. When the dragon reached the end of the heavy iron chain fastened to the iron collar around its neck, the castle foundations shook so hard that two of the stone towers actually crumbled and fell, the ground shaking like the earthquake Luther remembered from that one summer in his boyhood.

The dragon shrieked and spat out a plume of fire, cutting Luther's would-be redeemers off from their intended route of escape.

You will go no further! God roared from the sky. Leave him, and go back where you belong!

"He's mad," the young boy whimpered, bowing low on his horse's back, clutching the animal's mane with his small hand. "Let's give up and go."

"No, we can't," the woman said, holding her shining blue crystal high against the stormy skies. "Join me, both of you."

Luther could see the little one was afraid, shaking his head and crying. The older boy looked hesitant, though trying to hide his fear behind a mask of false pride. "Karen, we can't fight him. Maybe we should wait until we're stronger."

"No!" she shouted angrily, looking at the dragon. "Mark, join me now, or we'll never get another chance!"

The one she called Mark reluctantly agreed, holding his blue stone up beside hers. The light around them grew brighter.

"Now you, Danny. You can do it."

The child wiped away his tears and haltingly lifted his bright blue stone beside the other two. With the nimbus of light around them now as bright as a new dawn, the three riders set off again, Luther between them. The fire parted before them as they rode on. The dragon roared in rage, sending down a torrent of flame that streamed off the protective bubble of light. The riders strained to maintain the shield, their faces twisted in exertion as they fought to hold the crystals aloft, the light fading intermittently as their bodies seemed to flicker in and out of existence like a bad television picture.

Luther prayed as the three struggled on, finally clearing the reach of the dragon's fire and riding on beyond the smoldering fields of Hell into a barren expanse of desert. Luther strained his neck as he lifted his head to see where they were taking him. The desert ended at a partially charred forest and what looked like a churchyard of crosses. Beyond that lay a beautiful, sunlit garden of fruit-laden trees and crystal lakes under clear, blue skies. The magical horses took flight and sailed over the churchyard, carrying him into the new land.

Tears of joy streamed down his cheeks. He was forgiven. He was about to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

"How dare they interfere!" the sagging, middle-aged man seated in the interface chair muttered in his dream state, electric wires penetrating his shaved head. "How dare they take him from me?"

"What's he on about now?" Joey asked absently, glancing at the observation window as he took a bite of his pastrami sandwich.

"Looks like we've got a motivational disorder," Charley said, studying the cerebral schematic on his monitor.

A previously repressed emotional undercurrent was spiking into the default motivator stream, corrupting the principal dreamscape. The spike consisted of three nested curves, each a different color, stabbing upward as one into the purple flow of the default stream. The spike seemed to be inching closer to the flashing white dot representing the bubble memory recording of the executed killer's consciousness, downloaded into the customer's mind a split second before the execution.

The spike was an unsightly wrinkle, but a minor one, Charley reassured himself. Whatever world the computer had created from the customer's innermost desires, it was holding firm. Shoveling a plastic forkful of Chinese take-out into his mouth, he called up the analytical breakdown of the customer's various motivational imperatives, and nodded as one corresponded with the current spike.

"His surviving family members," he muttered to his companion, getting down the last of the orange-flavored chicken and hot-spiced mushroom and cellophane noodles. "Here, check out those three nested conception curves making up that spike on your monitor. The red curve—that's his daughter, Karen. The blue one's his youngest son, Danny, and the orange is the older boy, Mark. Karen's C.C. seems to be the strongest of the three. I guess she's his favorite. Or, the one he's most concerned about, or whatever." He washed down the mouthful of food with a swallow of some sickly carbonated brew from a can.

"So, what does this mean? His concern for his family is at war with his desire for revenge? Have we got a schizo pattern forming here?" Joey looked at Charley with concern, a speck of mustard at the corner of his mouth.

Charley sighed. Why did they always stick him with rookies? "Don't worry. It's nowhere near that level yet. This kind of conflict's not uncommon. Spillovers like this happen all the time. You're bound to see some degradation of the streams as the program drags on."

"But, not with a default stream this strong!" Joey protested, looking increasingly concerned. "We're talking about a level 6 here. Besides, a spillover's usually random and sloppy, the two streams melting into each other as slow degradation occurs in both. But, look—we've still got a solid level 6 on the default, getting steadily stronger. The recessive stream was just flowing quietly along, getting gobbled up by the default, until it suddenly spiked up and broke into the dominant stream, like it had a will of its own."

Charley shook his head. Rookies still gave him a laugh. "What are you suggesting?"

"Like I said: a schizo pattern. I've heard it happens. The manual says that sometimes, especially when two streams conflict, the different motivational imperatives take on separate personas. And if the conflict gets intense enough, they can start drawing more and more from the cognitive centers, taking on separate sentience."

Charley rolled his eyes. "That's just a theory. It's never been proven to happen. Don't let your imagination run away with you."

"Look, the insurance clause doesn't cover anything like this. If this gets worse and the customer contracts permanent schizophrenia or some other psyche damage—"

"That won't happen. Trust me. There are too many safeguards built into the system. The engineers have thought of everything. Now, shut up, and let me eat."

Luther groaned in pain as Mark wrenched the iron spikes from the holes in his wrists, freeing him from the remains of the cross. The girl he'd called Karen accepted a silver chalice Danny had filled from a clear spring nearby. She knelt over Luther, propped his head up in one of her strong, gentle hands, put the chalice to his parched lips and poured the water down his scorched throat.

It was sweet and pure, passing through his veins like new blood. He felt his wounds healing, the bones in his wrists miraculously knitting together. The sting of the acid was washed away, leaving his skin with a pleasant tingle. He sat up and looked at his arms and body. He was completely healed. The pain was gone. He looked into Karen's bright green eyes, and his own stung with tears.

Then he looked down and gasped, realizing he was naked.

"Here," Mark said coldly, handing him a garment that looked as though it had been fashioned from silver wire, a kind of chain-mail webbing. He slipped it on, the silver armor cool and comfortable against his skin.

Looking around the garden of Paradise, he saw a strange sight. Spirits of gray shadow and silver light, male and female, young and old, all resembling the three riders, drifted about the garden, melting into each other and turning into rising white mist. The trees drank in their essence, blossoming before his eyes until ripe fruit dropped and hatched; fluttering, translucent silver angels emerging from them like cocoons.

The newly hatched angels took to the air, spreading sweet perfume and gentle songs throughout the garden. Some hovered over the flowing springs like hummingbirds, and drank of the waters. Others faltered, their light flickering and growing weaker. Luther noticed that some were dead, lying at the edge of a nearby lake covered in some foul, clinging black pitch, like sea birds in an oil slick. Spirits clothed in hooded robes of metallic gray gathered the dead ones on pallets of gray stone, and carried them to the churchyard for burial.

"What are they?" he asked in wonder. "Angels?" But, angels couldn't die, could they?

"The people are time walkers," Karen sighed. "Spirits of what's been and what might be. The winged ones are hopes. They sustain this place. If they die, we die."

Little Danny buried his face in his hands and Mark held him, comforting him. Luther looked into Karen's weary eyes, eyes on the verge of tears, and he began to feel afraid.

"I thought this was Heaven?"

"Come with me," Karen said grimly.

She walked off down a winding path through the lush trees and flowering plants. Luther followed her, Mark and Danny trailing behind. As she led him across the garden, he noticed the vegetation around him was beginning to whither, the bright blossoms shriveling and dying until only a scratchy tumble of thorns and brambles remained. The farther they went the grayer and more barren the garden became, until he found himself standing beside Karen at the edge of the desert. Grim, lifeless and windblown, the smoldering fields of Hell were visible not far away. And over everything, the dragon's black fortress loomed on its hilltop.

Karen pointed towards Hell. He looked, and saw a river of steaming black sludge, like a sewer main emptying into a harbor, flowing from the distant castle, across Hell and the desert, and empting into a stream at the edge of the garden.

"The dragon's excrement," Karen said gravely. "It's polluting the healing waters of faith that sustain the hopes. If it goes on, the garden is finished." Raising her hood and bundling her cloak about her, she walked out across the windblown sands toward the river's edge.

Mark followed, holding Danny's hand. "You coming?" he asked Luther with cold disdain, glancing back.

Luther hesitated. He didn't know what to believe, or even what he was facing anymore. But these people were all he had, this land of theirs his only refuge. He had to go along with them. Pulling the hood of his silver metal robe over his head he ran after them, the winds howling in his ears, the sand pelting against the wire mesh.

They reached the edge of the river, a pitch black, steaming soup of muck and mire in an oily current of devil's urine. The stench, a hot, heavy, choking steam, like an open sewer on a blazing August day, made him ill.

"Your blood nourished the dragon," Karen said, looking back at Luther, the hot wind out of Hell ruffling her cloak and hood, wisps of her red hair blowing across her face. "It fed on you, growing stronger by the day. We freed you hoping to starve the dragon, but we were too late. The chain our father put around its neck won't last much longer."

"Don't let it come," Danny sobbed, holding tight to Mark's cloak.

Now Luther was really scared. "But, God—I mean, your 'father'—whoever that dude over there is…he won't let that happen, will he?" he asked hopefully.

Karen bowed her head. "The dragon tricked him," she said quietly, a tremor in her voice. "Dad wouldn't let our mother walk free or join us in the garden. He imprisoned her in crystal, so he could keep her safe forever. The dragon counted on that. It promised to guard her, but instead, it buried her in its filthy soot and droppings, deeper and deeper, until her light couldn't shine here anymore. It used you to keep Dad distracted, so he neglected Mom more and more, not bothering to visit her shrine, not even noticing the dragon had buried her." She looked up at him, two small tears running down her cheeks. "All this, because you killed her."

The expression in her eyes wasn't sorrow, or even anger. Just cold emptiness, like Luther had felt when his older brother Tarrence had gotten killed, or when his dad had gone away.

"I'm sorry," he said. Looking off towards the horizon, into the gray, stormy skies over Hell, the storm clouds drawing nearer and nearer, he began to realize for the first time what he'd created. We make our own hell, Tarrence had once said, that same tired, empty look in his eyes. Don't make yours, little brother.

"But, what can I do? I can't bring her back!"

"Yes, you can!" Mark shouted angrily. "She's still alive in the castle. You have to go there and free her."

"Me! Why me? You have the power."

"We're not strong enough to break into the dragon's fortress," Karen said. "That's the only way in." She pointed at the river.

Luther looked into the river and cringed. "No way. Look, I want to help, but you know I can't do this. Why can't you go?"

Karen turned her back on him and stepped out onto the river. He gaped in awe as the river instantly froze over, a thick sheet of solid ice forming under her feet. She walked out onto the shimmering, glassy-white surface. As she walked down the length of the river, several yards west towards the dragon's realm, the ice extended in front of her, the river freezing as she went. She turned and started back, the ice melting behind her as she neared Luther and the others. She stepped off the river at Luther's side, and the last of the ice disappeared.

"The river wasn't meant for us," she said. "It came from the dragon, and the dragon was weaned on your blood. The river won't refuse you."

"I can't survive in that!" he cried.

"We can use what power we have left to armor you against the poison of the river. But you have to do the rest. Will you help us?"

He looked from Karen's tired, pained eyes; to Mark's stern, angry face; to Danny's pleading, teary eyes, and knew he had no choice. He sighed and clenched his fists. All this, because he'd had to prove he was a big man.

Well, now was his chance to prove he was any kind of man. And maybe in a way that mattered to God.

"Oh, no," Joey wined, looking at his computer monitor.

"What now?" Exasperated, Charley put down his Styrofoam coffee cup.

"It's the dead guy. The B.M.R., I mean. It's become part of the spike."

"What? That's impossible, dummy! It's bottled up inside the default. Here, let me see."

He closed his cerebral systems diagnostic and brought the motivational graphic program up on his own monitor. His mouth dropped at what he saw. The flashing white dot was now a solid white cursor arrow, forming the spear-like tip of the motivational spike now stabbing deeper into the default stream.

"Holy— This is impossible! How the hell can a repressed motivational stream just flare up like that, snatch a selected piece of the default, and…and mount a combined assault?" Cripes, the rookie was beginning to infect him. Charley scratched his head, staring at the screen in disbelief.

"This is damned serious," Joey stammered, his thin face growing pale. "The manual doesn't cover this" he said, pointing a trembling index finger at the white arrow. "That's a packaged sentient entity, not a conceptual construct like the others. If it…if he has become part of the spike, then that proves it's the product of a major schizo development. There's another entity in there, maybe more than one and it or they have…well, formed an alliance of some kind with dead boy, there."

"That's crazy," Charley insisted, clutching his head in both hands. Yet, he couldn't dismiss what he was seeing with his own eyes. "This can't be happening. Call the hardware techs and tell them to run a full diagnostic on the computer system. And have these monitors checked out while you're at it."

"Shouldn't we unplug the customer first?"

"And risk a refund? No way. We'd be fired for sure. The program stays running, no matter what."

Sparks flew as Mark swung his enchanted hammer. The time walkers fetched him bowl after bowl of molten metal from a glowing blue vein under the garden. Laboring over the anvil, Mark pounded the blue metal. Steam rose as he cooled the finished piece by dipping it in the stream. He lifted it out with iron tongs. It was a breastplate, shining bright as silver in the light of the last few flickering hopes. Mark laid it on the ground beside the other pieces he'd forged. "Finished." he declared.

Karen lifted the sword her brother had made, testing its weight. "Try it," she said, handing it to Luther.

He took it by the hilt and hefted it, swinging it in wide circles. It felt good; strong, yet light.

"It's forged from the metal of love," Karen explained. "Mined from the same stones from which our three life crystals were cut. Try on the armor."

He did as she asked, shedding his gray mail robes and putting on the armor, piece by piece. It didn't feel either as heavy or as clumsy as he'd expected. It was light as a mantle of air, and felt like a protective second skin. The helmet wasn't what he'd expected, either. It was big and bucket-shaped, with glass panels for him to see out of. There were long metal tubes leading out of the helmet and into two metal cylinders he wore on his back. He realized it resembled one of the deep-sea air suits he'd read about as a kid.

"Your dreams helped shape the metal," Mark said.

"Here, take these," Karen said, placing a thin silver chain around his neck. From the chain were hung the three glowing sapphires that had saved him from Hell. "They'll light your way."

"They're all we have left," Mark said with concern. "We've put all we have into them."

The armor suddenly felt a lot heavier. But it was too late to back out. "So, am I ready?"

"We've done all we can," Karen answered. "The rest is up to you."

Sighing, he took one last look around the garden of hopes and set off towards the river of hate. As he stood at its edge, all he could think of was climbing down into that sewage tunnel with Andre.

He took a deep breath and stepped off the bank. Dropping like a stone into the steaming blackness, he sank straight to the bottom. He tried to walk against the current, his armored boots slipping over the slimy stones of the river bed. The glowing stones around his neck cast only a feeble light in the inky darkness. His breathing was labored, the air growing hot inside his suit as he worked his way towards the castle.

Luther surfaced into a dank, filthy chamber in the castle basement. The stone floors were black with the dragon's waste, the walls black with the dragon's soot. Luther's sword shone in the dim, bluish glow of the stones around his neck as he made his way through the darkness.

The columns trembled around him as the light fell on a gigantic iron ring set into the stone floor. A great chain led from it, up through a shaft in the chamber's roof and disappearing into the darkness above. Roaring and thrashing echoed down through the shaft and the chain tightened, the stones cracking and fissuring around its base.

The dragon could break free at any moment, Luther suddenly realized. He made his way quickly up a flight of stone stairs into a large, ruined chamber. At its center was a kind of dais, with stone steps, and a tall, wide pillar at the top. It was buried under a thick, crusty layer of filth and sediment. As he walked towards it, something crunched under his foot. He looked down, and saw that it was a piece of a curved shell of some sort.

Something stirred in the darkness, a sound like rustling leather, then a low hissing. He swung his sword towards the sound. His light revealed a number of huge, gray eggs, several already hatched.

A piercing shriek came out of the shadows, curdling Luther's blood. He turned towards it, and a black, scaly dragon spawn with flaming red eyes and glistening white fangs flew straight at him. Its leathery black wings stretched out with a span of about eight feet.

It spat fire into Luther's face, and his head felt like it was cooking inside his helmet. Then the monster's curved talons crashed into him, sending him sprawling to the stone floor. The beast screamed and swooped down on him, its talons pinning his legs, its fangs gnashing against his helmet. He could see down its smoldering red throat.

He thrashed and swung wildly, slashing open the devil's face. Steaming black blood sprayed over the helmet's glass view plates. The dragon whelp shrieked and spat acid at him. Stinking fumes of dissolving metal rose inside his armor. He drove his sword into the beast's throat and twisted it, slashing angrily.

The young dragon trembled and lay still at his feet. He kicked the corpse in disgust and started again for the dais. Three more of the monsters flew screaming at him from the shadows. They swooped, their wings beating cruelly against his armor, their fangs gnashing, and he remembered jumping in the day he was initiated into his gang. There'd been about a dozen boys around him, kicking him in his ribs, beating the hell out of him, to see if he could take it like a man. Well, he'd passed then. He would again. He swung his sword with all his might, cutting in wide arcs.

He hacked a wing off one dragon; put out another's eye. The third monster slashed at him with its talons and he turned his rage loose, screaming as he swung his sword round and round in a circle. He forced the dragon back, cutting, wounding.

He chopped off its head with one clean stroke. The other two squealed and clawed; he killed them, too.

Stooped with weariness and breathing heavily, he made his way up the steps of the dais. The room shook, the castle crumbling around him.

The dragon's chain had broken.

"Damn!" he screamed at the trembling walls. The ceiling crashed down on top of him.

Free!!

The dragon let out a roar of triumph as it flew from the castle turrets towards the garden of hopes.

The sky turned to fire. Karen looked up into the burning sky and wept. Mark held Danny close as the last of the hopes died.

Charley slumped back in his chair with an overwhelming sense of relief. "Thank God that's over," he said, looking at the monitor screen. The bright purple of the default stream had completely overwhelmed the multi-colored spike of the recessive stream. "The default stream is secure."

"It's more than just secure," Joey said, his face pale, his voice trembling. "It's completely dominant. I mean, across the board. There's absolutely nothing else in there anymore. This guy's whole personality now consists of hate! Charley, this is worse than we thought. This could be permanent. I'm unplugging him now!"

"No! Are you crazy? We'll never work again! Come back here, you jerk!"

Joey ran into the interface chamber and began disconnecting the electrodes from the customer's skull.

Charley ran after him, and had nearly caught him when the customer reached up from the interface chair and grabbed Joey's throat in one of his large, meaty hands. Joey choked, his face turning red, his eyes bulging.

"Free," the customer said, a cruel smile crossing his face.

He pinned Joey's scrawny neck under one of his burly arms. Joey struggled feebly. Charley's knees turned to putty when he heard the dull snap of Joey's neck breaking.

The rookie's dead body slumped to the floor. The man who had killed him stepped on his lifeless form as he stood up and ripped an electrical cable loose from the interface terminal.

"Your turn," he whispered behind an evil smile as he wrapped the cable around both his hands, pulling it taut between them like a garrote.

Charley tried to scream, but couldn't find his voice.

Luther struggled out of his broken armor, crawling naked from under the shattered masonry of the castle, now a half-fallen ruin. The chamber where he'd killed the three dragon spawn was still partially intact above him, at the top of a mountain of shattered stone. But the buried pillar at the summit of the stone dais was blocked by a fallen column, and Luther's sword was hopelessly lost somewhere in the rubble.

He climbed feebly over the jagged stones, searching the basement for something, anything, he could use as a tool. The sapphire stones were lost, but with the castle roof ripped open, the flaming sky bathed the lower chambers in a bloody red glow.

Luther knew his time was almost up. It was then he noticed the red light reflecting off the shattered rings of the dragon's broken chain. He lifted one of the curved, heavy shards of metal and studied it in the dusky light. As he'd hoped, it was forged from the same metal as his sword.

Carrying the heavy shard, he struggled up the slope of jagged stone to the fallen pillar lying between him and his goal. He swung with all his might; the metal bludgeon sparked blue off the stone. Luther cried out in anger and swung again and again, until the stone shattered and he could reach the hardened wall of sediment on the other side.

Using the metal shard like a miner's pick, he cut loose a piece of the wall. White light shone from the other side. There, behind the wall of dried, calcified hate, was a woman's face, frozen in crystal.

The woman he had killed.

Luther chipped away at the cocoon of hate until the last of it crumbled away, revealing the woman within. She was as perfect and beautiful as the Virgin Mother, dressed in a long, immaculate white gown, and encased in a pillar of crystal, like a wall of pure diamond, glowing blue and silver with her inner light.

Luther prepared himself, calling up whatever strength he had left. He swung. The steel rang off the diamond-hard shell and his hands ached with the impact. He screamed in rage and swung again. And again. And again. The diamond cracked and shattered like ice.

The light trapped inside exploded through the chamber like a new sun appearing out of the darkness. Luther dropped the shard and fell to his knees in exhaustion, shielding his eyes against the blinding white light. At last, it softened to a comforting, silver-blue, like that which had saved him from Hell, and he cautiously looked up.

There she stood, limned with silver light, her white wings opened and spread wide. Her eyes shone with gratitude…and forgiveness.

As the last of the castle crumbled around him, her light shielded him from the falling stone. She placed a protective bubble around him and carried him into the flaming sky. Where she passed, the flames dissipated and blue sky appeared.

The angel woman carried Luther across the desert and back to the garden of hopes. Its trees were now aflame, the dragon hovering above it, black and terrible, its wings fanning the flames. But the angel sent forth waves of shimmering silver rains that doused the fires, even as she set Luther down safely in the garden.

He looked up, and saw the dragon belch torrents of fire and poisonous black smoke at the hovering angel. She spread her arms, and a searing white nimbus of light spread around her, filling the sky. The dragon screamed and withered in the blasting white rays, its black wings crumpling like paper fans in fire. It grew thinner and thinner, its flesh dissolving until only a spiny black skeleton remained. Then, even the bones crumbled into black ash.

Luther smiled as the angel shone like the sun in a clear blue sky. The river of hate dried up and disappeared. Springs of clear water welled up from inside the earth, and the desert grew fertile and green. The trees and plants sprouted and blossomed. He looked around, saw that new hopes were being born.

Charley gasped in pain, his head spinning as the electrical cable slackened from around his throat. He tried to breathe, struggling out of dim nightmare as the shadowy gray all around him gave way to blurry light. The large man with the wires in his head knelt beside Joey's dead body.

"Oh, dear God," the man whispered as he began to cry. "What have I done?"

In their deep-sea air suits, Luther, Karen, Mark and Danny, along with their new allies, made their way from their underwater city, leaving behind the bright coral and shining fish of their new hopes, and passing into that part of the ocean now blackened with poisonous hate.

Surfacing in the black tide and walking ashore, Luther found himself in Hell. A middle-aged man hung nailed to a cross, screaming in pain. Flames raged around him. Demons shrieked and stabbed at him. Vampires drank his blood. In a dark castle on a hill above, a dragon on a chain roared and fed on the blood-fattened vampires.

"Dear God, forgive me!" the man cried. The dark sky was shattered with lightning. Acid rains poured down onto the dead lands as a woman's voice roared from the stormy skies.

You killed my son! she screamed. Now, suffer!

"Daddy!" Karen screamed, running towards the man on the cross.

Luther and the others ran after her, brandishing spears tipped with shining blue sapphires. Demons ran screaming towards them. Dragon fire rained from above. Karen's mother hovered overhead, shielding Karen and Luther and the others with what little power she had left.

Luther prayed they could save the man, and free Joey from his prison in the castle, before this dragon broke its chain.