Azalea Ainsworth had given a decade to this place. Kap’n Kraken’s Crabs N’ Cracklin’s Seaside Bar & Grill. Azalea looked down at her hands, glossy with fresh blood. Ten years kept from the shift manager roll, only to be met with such an indecent proposal at her after-hours ‘performance review’. Part of a broken chair fell from her grasp. A curse spat from her lips upon his broken husk. Azalea watched the blood pool around him, thick, glossy and dark like a hole in the floor.

Azalea peered into that spreading abyss, transfixed. Her heart was still racing, her breath still labored from yelling. Her body was steaming from the exertion, but now stood rigidly still. Through her hoarse throat, Azalea called into the pond of blood, offering her kill to whomever would take it. A croak answered her from the depths.

The Baleful Toad. The only name this otherworldly malice had ever known. Cursed and sealed at the bottom of a well for an eternity, he was the only being spared when the world of gods above his prison ended. He alone was left to eat their ashes in the cold, dead world he’d emerged into, a hatred and wrath with no target to satisfy him. A hunger with nothing living left to eat. A world no better than his well. He felt a kinship with the caller, and took the offering. The corpse slid into the pool of blood and disappeared. The Baleful Toad bubbled up from the crimson pool to meet his caller’s gaze. He offered a pact, a partnership. But he had no use for her on this Earth, in this Bar Harbor, Maine. Azalea would join with him, in a world neither had set foot in before. They would take that world, together.

How could she refuse? She had nothing left in that world anymore.


Candy Cranston had given everything to her company. The Starlight Raiders. Candy looked down at her hands, glossy red pant glimmered in accents against dark iron. They were stronger than the pair she’d lost on a job last year. She matched the other prosthetic’d members of the mercenary company. Top of the line, the Starlight Raiders were like a family, nobody who gave a limb would be left hanging. They put each other first. Casualties were not an option.

So how had this job gone so wrong?

Candy roared in battle fervor. She bolted through the hail of bullets to return suppressive fire. She pushed past her color-coordinated brothers-in-arms as streams of gunfire cut them to ribbons. Candy wove through the volleys and managed to take out a few of the gangsters herself, before something new sliced through the chaos of the battlefield. A gleaming blade. The way it danced, glittering at the edge of her sight, Candy wasn’t sure it was real. Every time it tugged at the edge of her vision, she barely avoided a volley of gunfire. She tried to ignore it and focus on the fight in front of her, so she never saw it coming until the blade was embedded in her chest. Candy gazed up with horrified, searching eyes at the warrior who stood above her, radiant and shining in her glory. Candy screamed in desperate agony, knowing not a one of the Starlight Raiders would survive. That all they’d given up to protect each other would be undone. Then the light went out of Candy’s eyes.

Azalea woke up in a new body, in a dumpster. She kicked open the lid and the gloom of the alley gave Azalea some light to see by. There were other bodies in there in armor like hers. Azalea pulled herself out of the dumpster and stared down at her new, mechanical hands. Azalea wondered who the woman had been. There was a scar on her chest, thin like a blade. Her fingertips traced the mark. The Baleful Toad broke the silence.

“Ah good, there you are.” He croaked from over Azalea’s shoulder, where he had sprouted. “Glad you made it. I’ve got something for you. Your half of her.”

Azalea’s new skull flooded with some of the memories that had been robbed from it. Azalea remembered Candy, parts of her. Her mercenary career, her training, a vague, fuzzy impression of those she’d worked with. Her death. That woman with the sword.

“Half for you, half for me. Don’t worry, I gave you the important parts.” The Baleful Toad croaked. “That’s how this is going to work. I get half of everything we’ll consume. People, beasts, gods. Together, we’ll have everything we’ve been denied.”

“We will become as gods.”