Imago 21.6, Interlude 21, Word of God, The Butchers Bill: 1.1

My eyes still didn’t leave Butcher.  I watched, waited.

She didn’t understand what was going on, why we weren’t pressing the attack.

But she wasn’t confident either.

She strung her bow, as if testing us.  She started to create an arrow out of sand, condensing it into a more solid form.

Then she gave up, stepped back.  The hardened rod of sand crumbled.

“Stop it,” she said.

I shook my head.

She lashed out, hit us with raw pain.

In the agony, the feeling of fire running through my veins, I toppled from Bentley’s back.

I’d anticipated this, or something like it, knew it was temporary.  I could only grit my teeth and tell myself it was almost the best case scenario, even when it didn’t quite feel like it.

Rachel’s dogs bristled, but the pain dissipated, and she found herself free to command them to stand down.

It didn’t matter.  Butcher was on her knees now, face turned toward the ground.

“Don’t say anything,” I murmured.

With more focus than before, Butcher formed a spike out of hard sand.

She was murmuring to herself now.  Conversing under her breath with the voices in her head.  She sounded oddly insistent, plaintive in a very childish manner.

When the weapon was formed, she glanced skyward, murmured something indistinct.

Then teleported a distance into the air, directly above the spike.

There was a wet sound, a pause.

“Nothing?” I asked Rachel.  “You… don’t feel her powers?”

She shook her head.

“Then let’s go.”

We began our long journey back to the others, leaving Butcher with a spike through her heart.

—Imago 21.6



“No. The analysis is right. I won’t disagree. But I have other concerns. This business with how you murdered Butcher. The girl at the bottom of the Boat Graveyard… Cherish… it was a risky decision.”

—Worm: Interlude 21



Cherish was placed in a perpetual-life sarcophagus and dropped to the bottom of the bay, in the boat graveyard. In the mayoral debates, they remark on the ambient aura of suicidal depression that was hitting anyone who ventured into that area - Cherish's power working without targets or limiters.

Butcher was lured into that area.

—Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/6jpggx/question_about_imago_216/djg0k6l/
—Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20220616195306/https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/6jpggx/question_about_imago_216/djg0k6l/



I could feel a muttering in the back of my head, a chorus of my own personal Greek Furies, begging me to rip, to tear, to slaughter my friends and allies. I pleaded with that voice to be silent, and for the moment, it was. Not trusting myself to speak, I reached out to my swarm. "Butcher - or Quarrel, anyways - had an allergy to bee stings."

I stopped to let that sink in, and heard a low, moaned "oh god, no." from behind me. Brian. A small, distracted part of me couldn't help but feel happy, that he had felt so strongly as to let that slip.

"For now, I am in control. The plan will proceed as previously discussed. We make our way to the Harbor, Cherish makes the Butcher commit suicide, and the Undersiders and the Ambassadors go home."

—The Butchers Bill: 1.1