Lixi nodded in understanding, then tipped her head in the direction of a small, open patch of the soft white sand at the base of the large rock. "Lets go sit down first. We can at least relax while we talk." She lead him the few remaining steps before gingerly folding herself down to sit daintily in the sand, then waited for him to settle before leaning back against him. "I know I already started to say this out there... at least I think I did... I can't really remember what would have been understandable to you. I know I drifted back into the creation tongue. At any rate... Miah wasn't exactly Miah anymore. Joel wasn't lying. He died out there. Joel brought him back. I suspect he now has some kind of metal link to him, just as he does to me, maybe even more so. I don't think he was meant to spy on us as much as he was to get a line into heaven."

"I almost killed him to keep him from doing so... but, I couldn't... I just couldn't. Same reason I didn't realize what he was sooner. As much as he enrages me, he's still my brother. Joel's doing or not, it is still partially him in there, I just don't know that he has much control over himself, or maybe he's just being forced into doing all this to preserve his false life somehow... I don't know. I couldn't dig deep enough to find out." The ambient light shimmered off the unnaturally pure sand like it was a bed of diamonds as tears clouded Lixi's eyes. She'd figured out what her brother had become when they spoke atop the step pyramid of Memphis earlier that day, but she'd only just now truly processed the concept.

Jeremiah's words, his message, no, Joel's message set in all the more as the tie between the two concepts registered stronger in her mind. She hadn't even realized she was doing so, but as she thought, the soft, human frame she sported in this reality was slowly curling into a ball. Her knees were drawing upwards as her whole body pivoted sideways, leaning on Martin all the more, and her arms moved to wrap around her knees as they neared her chest.

"Fucking necromantic scum... nothing is sacred to him anymore, not even death. Martin, I don't understand how it's possible even... there really is no escape from him. Even in death, he can retrieve my kind. We don't have souls! That shouldn't be possible... and yet... it was. Miah was still Miah, just, wrong. It was him. His actions, his memories, his mannerisms. Not just some cheap copy put into his body. That was my brother... but... darker." The back of her hand quickly swiped away the two tears from her cheeks as she sought to stalwart herself against the grief of it. "He fallowed me out this morning to try to tell me about... well..." Lixi raised the hand that had dried her cheek to point at the statue that faced them, suddenly feeling sickened by the image of it, and nearly frightened at the idea of him watching her sit in the arms of her new lover.

Remembering that she controlled everything in this tiny little space, Lixi turned her hand so it was palm up instead, and drew it back close to her lips. She blew a long slow breath out over her palm, as though she were blowing confetti or dust out of her palm in the direction of the two statues. The tiny breath turned into a strong, swirling gust, picking up particles of sand and ruffling the foliage as it went, growing larger all the while till it reached the statues. Quickly, they statues began to blow away particle by particle, as though they were both composed of loosely packed sand, rather than the solid black stone they'd appeared as, until eventually there was nothing left of either of them, not even an imprint in the sand.

"Jeremiah told me that what he said in the wine cellar was true, that Samathael is alive again, by Joel's doing. It took me a while to get him to tell me the truth on it. At first he kept claiming Sama had been alive all this time, tried to get me to believe he was never dead to begin with, that it was all in my head. A well constructed lie that I'd started to believe myself in my slipping sanity. Slipping sanity or not, my brother is a bad liar, so it wasn't hard to see through it and eventually get the truth of it out of him. At the point that he claimed to know for a fact that Joel could bring back dead angels, he accidentally said that he himself was walking proof of it. That would be how I figured out the rest about Miah. When he admitted it, he recoiled so quickly I was able to get a glimpse of his mind, his memories, of death, of waking back up, of Sama and Joel. I don't know if the time someone is dead for affects how they come back or not, but I'm fairly certain it must. Miah would have only been dead for a few hours, maybe a few days, when he came back, and he was pretty severely corrupted. Samathael... well... lets just say he isn't anything I recognize beyond the features of his face. He's become almost as darkly twisted as Joel himself."

Lixi closed her eyes and let out a soft shuttering sigh before whispering in a shaky, weak voice. "Our already impossible task just got even harder if we wished to destroy Joel in the process. He's got to many aces hidden up his sleeve, and we've got shit for a hand."

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