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bottleprophetThe London that Billy is from is a city of gods and magic, rooted in faith. Things are magical because peoples’ belief has convinced the world that they should be, and you can’t walk down a street without invoking one god or another. People who occupy the city and can consciously manipulate the world are common, but all of this exists beneath the surface of London, while most of the population remains oblivious.
Billy Harrow was born in the world of the mundane to an upper middle class family. He rarely got along with his older brother, and never had anything in common with his father. After his mother died when Billy was in his early twenties, he and his father fell out of contact due to a mutual disinterest. Even as a child, Billy was fascinated by marine life and museums, and would later write his masters thesis on marine molluscs. He was hired to work at the Darwin Center, preserving and bottling specimens. Initially, Billy was atrocious at his job, to the point where he was considering quitting. But a year after being hired, Billy told a story during a drunken outing with friends who were all trying to bluff one another. He claimed that he was the first successful baby born via in vitro fertilization, but due to complications the laurel was officially handed to another family some time later. He was extremely convincing, and the game ended before he could tell the truth.
Billy decided to keep up this joke when he returned to work, and for the next several years never corrected anyone. The talk was overheard by the museum’s guardian, a mnemophylax, an Angel of Memory. People place so much value onto the memories collected in museums that these places have real religious power, and eventually develop sentient angelic guardians. These Angels are able to choose prophets and messiahs, and the Darwin Center’s Angel, thematically made of preservation bottles, assumed that Billy was truly the first human born of glass. It chose him as its christ. Suddenly, Billy improved radically at his job. He became known for his uncanny ability to preserve animals (especially molluscs) in the most lifelike poses. Billy felt so confident in his talent that he believed he could preserve anything. His career flourished modestly, but nothing significantly changed, except that ever since then Billy began to hear odd noises. Bottles rolling on the floor when there was no one around, clattering test tubes in locked rooms, glass grinding in empty hallways... He associated these sounds with moments of anxiety or stress, and assumed it must have been all in his head. The one exciting incident since then was when the giant squid was delivered. Billy was amongst those who preserved the massive specimen.
Years later, Al Adler, an accomplished thief for the magical underworld, is commissioned by a powerful (and supposedly dead) man named Grisamentum to steal the squid. Out of traditional superstition, he went to the Londonmancers, a group of soothsayers connected to the city of London. They saw in his reading that stealing the squid would lead to the end of the world, and not just any end, but an end with no after.
When Adler didn't change his plan despite this, the Londonmancers recruited Simon Shaw's help. Simon had a ability that allowed him to transport any item or person as though they were being beamed Star Trek style. He beamed in Adler, all the while pretending to help him, but the plan was to use him as a distraction. While the Angel of Memory was preoccupied killing Adler, Simon transported himself in and stole the squid for the Londonmacers. Unfortunately, nothing changed in their prediction of the end of the world. In fact, the catastrophe seemed to feel even closer.
Billy was the one who discovered the squid was missing as he was conducting a tour. Amongst the police that arrive to investigate was a young woman who stood out to Billy. He later learned that her name was Kath Collingswood, and she was a very talented magic user. She knacked Billy and the rest of the witnesses present into not telling anyone about the missing squid. Billy, however, was able to resist the magical compulsion and told his friend Leon and Leon’s girlfriend, Marge. The next day he was called for a follow-up interview with an odd trio of policemen, which included Cloongswood along with two men, Baron and Vardy. After this odd encounter, Billy felt ill at ease and wandered the city aimlessly. In doing so, he spotted Dane Parnell, an unfriendly security guard who went missing after the squid theft. He seemed to be stalking Billy.
Billy returned to the Darwin Center the next day, and while there he heard the grinding glass of the Angel of Memory, which enticed him to follow it. He discovered the body of Al Adler, who’d been bottled like a specimen in a storage room. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood approached Billy again at the new crime scene, and this time they offered him a position as a consultant on the squid case. They explained the basics about what was happening, including that they were of the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit (FSRC), and they believed that theft of the squid is the work of a cult of squid worshippers.
Vardy, the profiler of the unit whose skill was his ability to adopt the mindset of the cults he hunted, saw Darwin’s Beagle samples while speaking with Billy. These samples eventually led Darwin to his theory of evolution. Vardy was so good at his job because he was motivated by his jealous loss of faith in literal Christianity, which he blamed on evolutionary theory. As a result of the squid’s theft, Vardy spotted these symbols of Darwin's work and he began to create a plot to reboot the world and bring it back to a state where he could revive his faith. Although no one knew it yet, this was the real threat to the the world.
Oblivious to this, the next day Billy yet again resisted Collingswood’s magical orders not to speak, and invited Leon over to tell him about what had happened. Leon accidentally brought in with him a package that hid the violent and dangerous Goss and Subby, a tall, older man and a young boy notorious throughout the magical world for their cruelty and invulnerability. The killers-for-hire murdered Leon and kidnapped Billy, and then dragged him before their current boss, the Tattoo. The Tattoo was once a normal mobster who rivaled Grisamentum. Gris punished him by having his soul tattooed onto the back of an unsuspecting man named Paul. The Tattoo now appeared as a living cartoon face on the back of Paul, who spent his time tied up and dragged around by the Tattoo’s goons.
The Tattoo wanted the squid for himself because of the power it supposedly held, and he believed Billy was the key to finding it. When it became clear that Billy was clueless, he had him taken away to face a fate worse than death. In a panic, Billy used his untapped, Angel-given knack to freeze time just long enough to escape Goss and Subby’s grasp. Dane was watching all along, and took the opportunity to jump in to help and quickly dragged Billy off to safety and into a car. Dane, as it turned out, was one of the squid worshippers Vardy mentioned, called the Krakenists. They believed that Billy was a prophet of their god, and they offered him protection that unfortunately also worked as a sort of captivity, since if Billy left he would be be found by the Tattoo's men. They fed him magically imbued squid ink to try and inspire strange, squid-themed fever dreams, which they hoped were prophetic. Billy was still in shock about what'd happened to Leon, and was unable to offer much resistance.
Dane, meanwhile, had made an agreement with the Krakenist head priest, the Tuethex. Dane was to pretend to abandon the church to search for the stolen squid while the Tuethex insisted that they didn't need to rescue their god. He referenced an important part of Kralenist theology to justify his "decision": the movement without moving. The rest of the congregation would assume Dane was an outcast, because it would make him extremely trustworthy to outsiders. If he found the squid, he was to burn it. However, what wasn’t part of the plan was offering Billy a chance to escape and come with him. Wanting revenge for Leon and some control over his life, Billy agreed, and so Dane stole the Kraken prophet. They ended up hiding out in a series of safe houses to evade recapture by anyone searching for them.
They recruited the aid of Wati, an ancient Egyptian spirit who dedicated his life to organizing unions for magical servants. The Tattoo had been attacking his strikes, and because of that Wati agreed to help Billy and Dane keep the squid from him. The three of them then approached the Londonmancers, who were required to remain neutral, and because of that would be obligated to not betray Dane and Billy to their pursuers. They were given a reading, which again confirms the end approaching. Not long after, they received a message from none other than Grisamentum himself, who should have been long dead. When they went to meet him, they instead find Byrne, a thanaturge and Gris’s girlfriend. She appeared to channel Gris through writing with a special ink. He offered Billy and Dane a chance to work with him to stop the Tattoo. Dane wanted to accept, but the Angel of Memory interceded and warned Billy. Based on Billy's sudden distrust of Gris, they declined the offer.
Billy, Dane and Wati began to narrow their list of suspects capable of moving the squid until they finally reached Simon Shaw, a Star Trek aficionado whose knack had moulded itself to fit his fandom. Although Simon's teleportation was powerful, in this world, when Simon transported a living person, it killed them and replaced them with a perfect duplicate. Simon was being haunted by all of the past selves he had unknowingly killed, and it had driven him almost completely mad. They saved Simon and handed him over to get an exorcism just before Goss and Subby caught up with them. Billy also found what Simon was paid with to steal the squid: a real working phaser. After its discovery, Billy used it as his weapon for the majority of the book.
In order to find who bought the phaser to give to Simon, they asked for help from Jason Smyle, a man who magically seemed familiar to absolutely everyone. To their surprise, the information Jason found told them it was Saira Mukhopadhyay, one of the Londonmancers. They confronted Saira and Fitch, who admitted to their involvement without much trouble. They had hired Simon and used Adler as bait to get the squid to safety, but it seemed to have fixed nothing. They then agreed to take Dane and Billy to the squid, but as they were waiting to be led to it, Chaos Nazis attacked. The Chaos Nazis were one of dozens of groups that had been contracted by the Tattoo to find Billy, but Billy’s Angel manifested itself just in time and slaughtered most of their attackers. However, unconcerned with Dane’s safety, it allowed him to be kidnapped as soon as Billy was no longer threatened.
For a while, Billy was in shock. Wati protected and hid him until he found his bearings. When Billy did recover, he contacted Jason again for help lookng for Dane. This is a turning point for Billy, because up until now he's been an almost entirely passive character. After Dane is kidnapped, Billy began to take control of his life and became a driving force behind the final events of the story. Because of a dream he had saying he was looking in the wrong direction, Billy changed the angle of his investigation and tried to find out more about the Angels. He was introduced to an ex-angel, the one-time guardian of the museum of the commonwealth, now closed. It told him that Billy was the Christ of the Darwin Center, chosen because his Angel believed he was a child born from glass. Billy became briefly hysterical about the mistaken choice, and the realization that all of his dreams and powers were connected to the Angel, not the kraken. However, he decided that he needed to accept this and use what he had in order to fix things and find Dane.
Meanwhile, Dane was being repeatedly tortured to death and then revived by his captors. However, he wouldn't reveal anything about the kraken or about where Billy might have been hiding.
Billy spoke to the sea next, which was the literal sea that had a cult of worshippers and possessed sentience. The sea was usually neutral, but Billy successfully convinced it to not only take a stance about the end of the world, but to assist him in saving Dane as well. The sea led Billy through the sewers, and Billy was able to storm the basement where Dane was being held. The sea then flooded the basement, killing the remaining nazis, and carrying Billy and Dane to safety. They reunited with the Londonmancers and were finally brought to the giant squid.
While that was going on, Jason Smyle attempted to sneak into the police station in hopes that they would know something about Dane’s whereabouts. There were suspicions that the Tattoo had dealings with the police. However, Jason’s ruse was seen through by Collingswood, and he was subsequently locked up. This gave Goss and Subby the opportunity to find Jason and then kill him when all the information he could give them was the phone number Billy called him from.
Billy and Dane followed some leads to a sort of end-of-the-world gathering that was arranged by the FSRC to gather information and find Billy again. Billy evaded notice, but in the chaos he and Dane managed to kidnap the Tattoo. They found out that the man unwillingly carrying the Tattoo on his back is named Paul, and he's been an unwilling participant in the Tattoo's cruelty for years.
They soon found out that Grisamentum had ordered the Krakenist church to be attacked, and most of its members were slaughtered, including the Tuethex. Dane was devastated, and admitted to Billy that all along he had been working with the Tuethex's blessings. Save, of course, for inviting Billy to come with him. In the aftermath, Dane assumed a position of leadership amongst the surviving Krakenists. Billy realized from the stolen library as well as assorted little paper birds left scattered around the church that Gris has actually become ink. After his body was burnt, Byrne turned the ashes into the ink that he was living on through. Billy boiled down the ink they could salvage off the paper birds, and interrogated Grisamentum by writing with his essence like Byrne had. The small piece of Grisamentum they had was vague and difficult, but Billy managed to make the connection that Gris planed to use the ink of the kraken to make himself, essentially, a god. By writing in the ink of a god, he could rewrite the world.
Dane and the remaining Krakenists decided to invoke a religious rite and become Krakenbit to combat Gris, which would grant them holy powers but would also change them permanently. Billy begged Dane not to, but was unable to convince him. In the end, he decided that if he couldn't change Dane's mind, he'd support him in his intended assault on Gris's workshop. The Londonmances, Billy and the Krakenbit, who have become half-human-half-squid monsters, attacked Grisamentum's forces the next day, but ultimately they failed. Grisamentum killed Dane during the course of the battle, Billy being unable to stop it, and then he discovered where the giant squid was being hidden.
Billy quickly constructed a plan to have the sea take back the kraken, since the sea was still ultimately neutral and Gris wouldn't risk invading it. With the help of a mostly recovered Simon Shaw, the kraken was transported into the Embassy of the Sea, which appeared as an underwater flat visible through a pane of glass below the harbor. Gris, however, was undeterred by the sea's neutrality and broke into the embassy, draining it of seawater. Billy was joined by Collingswood and Saira in the confrontation with Gris, but he reached the squid before they can stop him. Byrne used her magic to bring the squid partially to life, just enough to get it to produce ink. Gris then infected the ink of the god-squid, and began to rewrite rules. Billy only defeated him by redefining the squid, not as a god, but as his own bottled and preserved specimen. It robbed Gris of all his power, and he ceased to be entirely.
However, this did not avert the end of the world. Everyone could still feel it approaching, and Billy and Collingswood suddenly realized it's Vardy who's actually been causing all of this. The squid was just a bystander, and the real threat was Vardy noticing the Beagle specimens, and the research he had been doing on a sort of memory fire that erases from memory and reality all that it consumes. He planned to reboot reality and burn away the theory of evolution in order to recreate a world where a strictly literal Christian god still existed for him. However, without evolution, there would be no world, and no chance of a new one rising from the ashes.
Billy demanded that Simon beam him into the Darwin Center, even though it would kill him, so that he could stop Vardy. The last thing Billy will remember is the sensation of being torn apart.
Billy Harrow was born in the world of the mundane to an upper middle class family. He rarely got along with his older brother, and never had anything in common with his father. After his mother died when Billy was in his early twenties, he and his father fell out of contact due to a mutual disinterest. Even as a child, Billy was fascinated by marine life and museums, and would later write his masters thesis on marine molluscs. He was hired to work at the Darwin Center, preserving and bottling specimens. Initially, Billy was atrocious at his job, to the point where he was considering quitting. But a year after being hired, Billy told a story during a drunken outing with friends who were all trying to bluff one another. He claimed that he was the first successful baby born via in vitro fertilization, but due to complications the laurel was officially handed to another family some time later. He was extremely convincing, and the game ended before he could tell the truth.
Billy decided to keep up this joke when he returned to work, and for the next several years never corrected anyone. The talk was overheard by the museum’s guardian, a mnemophylax, an Angel of Memory. People place so much value onto the memories collected in museums that these places have real religious power, and eventually develop sentient angelic guardians. These Angels are able to choose prophets and messiahs, and the Darwin Center’s Angel, thematically made of preservation bottles, assumed that Billy was truly the first human born of glass. It chose him as its christ. Suddenly, Billy improved radically at his job. He became known for his uncanny ability to preserve animals (especially molluscs) in the most lifelike poses. Billy felt so confident in his talent that he believed he could preserve anything. His career flourished modestly, but nothing significantly changed, except that ever since then Billy began to hear odd noises. Bottles rolling on the floor when there was no one around, clattering test tubes in locked rooms, glass grinding in empty hallways... He associated these sounds with moments of anxiety or stress, and assumed it must have been all in his head. The one exciting incident since then was when the giant squid was delivered. Billy was amongst those who preserved the massive specimen.
Years later, Al Adler, an accomplished thief for the magical underworld, is commissioned by a powerful (and supposedly dead) man named Grisamentum to steal the squid. Out of traditional superstition, he went to the Londonmancers, a group of soothsayers connected to the city of London. They saw in his reading that stealing the squid would lead to the end of the world, and not just any end, but an end with no after.
When Adler didn't change his plan despite this, the Londonmancers recruited Simon Shaw's help. Simon had a ability that allowed him to transport any item or person as though they were being beamed Star Trek style. He beamed in Adler, all the while pretending to help him, but the plan was to use him as a distraction. While the Angel of Memory was preoccupied killing Adler, Simon transported himself in and stole the squid for the Londonmacers. Unfortunately, nothing changed in their prediction of the end of the world. In fact, the catastrophe seemed to feel even closer.
Billy was the one who discovered the squid was missing as he was conducting a tour. Amongst the police that arrive to investigate was a young woman who stood out to Billy. He later learned that her name was Kath Collingswood, and she was a very talented magic user. She knacked Billy and the rest of the witnesses present into not telling anyone about the missing squid. Billy, however, was able to resist the magical compulsion and told his friend Leon and Leon’s girlfriend, Marge. The next day he was called for a follow-up interview with an odd trio of policemen, which included Cloongswood along with two men, Baron and Vardy. After this odd encounter, Billy felt ill at ease and wandered the city aimlessly. In doing so, he spotted Dane Parnell, an unfriendly security guard who went missing after the squid theft. He seemed to be stalking Billy.
Billy returned to the Darwin Center the next day, and while there he heard the grinding glass of the Angel of Memory, which enticed him to follow it. He discovered the body of Al Adler, who’d been bottled like a specimen in a storage room. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood approached Billy again at the new crime scene, and this time they offered him a position as a consultant on the squid case. They explained the basics about what was happening, including that they were of the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit (FSRC), and they believed that theft of the squid is the work of a cult of squid worshippers.
Vardy, the profiler of the unit whose skill was his ability to adopt the mindset of the cults he hunted, saw Darwin’s Beagle samples while speaking with Billy. These samples eventually led Darwin to his theory of evolution. Vardy was so good at his job because he was motivated by his jealous loss of faith in literal Christianity, which he blamed on evolutionary theory. As a result of the squid’s theft, Vardy spotted these symbols of Darwin's work and he began to create a plot to reboot the world and bring it back to a state where he could revive his faith. Although no one knew it yet, this was the real threat to the the world.
Oblivious to this, the next day Billy yet again resisted Collingswood’s magical orders not to speak, and invited Leon over to tell him about what had happened. Leon accidentally brought in with him a package that hid the violent and dangerous Goss and Subby, a tall, older man and a young boy notorious throughout the magical world for their cruelty and invulnerability. The killers-for-hire murdered Leon and kidnapped Billy, and then dragged him before their current boss, the Tattoo. The Tattoo was once a normal mobster who rivaled Grisamentum. Gris punished him by having his soul tattooed onto the back of an unsuspecting man named Paul. The Tattoo now appeared as a living cartoon face on the back of Paul, who spent his time tied up and dragged around by the Tattoo’s goons.
The Tattoo wanted the squid for himself because of the power it supposedly held, and he believed Billy was the key to finding it. When it became clear that Billy was clueless, he had him taken away to face a fate worse than death. In a panic, Billy used his untapped, Angel-given knack to freeze time just long enough to escape Goss and Subby’s grasp. Dane was watching all along, and took the opportunity to jump in to help and quickly dragged Billy off to safety and into a car. Dane, as it turned out, was one of the squid worshippers Vardy mentioned, called the Krakenists. They believed that Billy was a prophet of their god, and they offered him protection that unfortunately also worked as a sort of captivity, since if Billy left he would be be found by the Tattoo's men. They fed him magically imbued squid ink to try and inspire strange, squid-themed fever dreams, which they hoped were prophetic. Billy was still in shock about what'd happened to Leon, and was unable to offer much resistance.
Dane, meanwhile, had made an agreement with the Krakenist head priest, the Tuethex. Dane was to pretend to abandon the church to search for the stolen squid while the Tuethex insisted that they didn't need to rescue their god. He referenced an important part of Kralenist theology to justify his "decision": the movement without moving. The rest of the congregation would assume Dane was an outcast, because it would make him extremely trustworthy to outsiders. If he found the squid, he was to burn it. However, what wasn’t part of the plan was offering Billy a chance to escape and come with him. Wanting revenge for Leon and some control over his life, Billy agreed, and so Dane stole the Kraken prophet. They ended up hiding out in a series of safe houses to evade recapture by anyone searching for them.
They recruited the aid of Wati, an ancient Egyptian spirit who dedicated his life to organizing unions for magical servants. The Tattoo had been attacking his strikes, and because of that Wati agreed to help Billy and Dane keep the squid from him. The three of them then approached the Londonmancers, who were required to remain neutral, and because of that would be obligated to not betray Dane and Billy to their pursuers. They were given a reading, which again confirms the end approaching. Not long after, they received a message from none other than Grisamentum himself, who should have been long dead. When they went to meet him, they instead find Byrne, a thanaturge and Gris’s girlfriend. She appeared to channel Gris through writing with a special ink. He offered Billy and Dane a chance to work with him to stop the Tattoo. Dane wanted to accept, but the Angel of Memory interceded and warned Billy. Based on Billy's sudden distrust of Gris, they declined the offer.
Billy, Dane and Wati began to narrow their list of suspects capable of moving the squid until they finally reached Simon Shaw, a Star Trek aficionado whose knack had moulded itself to fit his fandom. Although Simon's teleportation was powerful, in this world, when Simon transported a living person, it killed them and replaced them with a perfect duplicate. Simon was being haunted by all of the past selves he had unknowingly killed, and it had driven him almost completely mad. They saved Simon and handed him over to get an exorcism just before Goss and Subby caught up with them. Billy also found what Simon was paid with to steal the squid: a real working phaser. After its discovery, Billy used it as his weapon for the majority of the book.
In order to find who bought the phaser to give to Simon, they asked for help from Jason Smyle, a man who magically seemed familiar to absolutely everyone. To their surprise, the information Jason found told them it was Saira Mukhopadhyay, one of the Londonmancers. They confronted Saira and Fitch, who admitted to their involvement without much trouble. They had hired Simon and used Adler as bait to get the squid to safety, but it seemed to have fixed nothing. They then agreed to take Dane and Billy to the squid, but as they were waiting to be led to it, Chaos Nazis attacked. The Chaos Nazis were one of dozens of groups that had been contracted by the Tattoo to find Billy, but Billy’s Angel manifested itself just in time and slaughtered most of their attackers. However, unconcerned with Dane’s safety, it allowed him to be kidnapped as soon as Billy was no longer threatened.
For a while, Billy was in shock. Wati protected and hid him until he found his bearings. When Billy did recover, he contacted Jason again for help lookng for Dane. This is a turning point for Billy, because up until now he's been an almost entirely passive character. After Dane is kidnapped, Billy began to take control of his life and became a driving force behind the final events of the story. Because of a dream he had saying he was looking in the wrong direction, Billy changed the angle of his investigation and tried to find out more about the Angels. He was introduced to an ex-angel, the one-time guardian of the museum of the commonwealth, now closed. It told him that Billy was the Christ of the Darwin Center, chosen because his Angel believed he was a child born from glass. Billy became briefly hysterical about the mistaken choice, and the realization that all of his dreams and powers were connected to the Angel, not the kraken. However, he decided that he needed to accept this and use what he had in order to fix things and find Dane.
Meanwhile, Dane was being repeatedly tortured to death and then revived by his captors. However, he wouldn't reveal anything about the kraken or about where Billy might have been hiding.
Billy spoke to the sea next, which was the literal sea that had a cult of worshippers and possessed sentience. The sea was usually neutral, but Billy successfully convinced it to not only take a stance about the end of the world, but to assist him in saving Dane as well. The sea led Billy through the sewers, and Billy was able to storm the basement where Dane was being held. The sea then flooded the basement, killing the remaining nazis, and carrying Billy and Dane to safety. They reunited with the Londonmancers and were finally brought to the giant squid.
While that was going on, Jason Smyle attempted to sneak into the police station in hopes that they would know something about Dane’s whereabouts. There were suspicions that the Tattoo had dealings with the police. However, Jason’s ruse was seen through by Collingswood, and he was subsequently locked up. This gave Goss and Subby the opportunity to find Jason and then kill him when all the information he could give them was the phone number Billy called him from.
Billy and Dane followed some leads to a sort of end-of-the-world gathering that was arranged by the FSRC to gather information and find Billy again. Billy evaded notice, but in the chaos he and Dane managed to kidnap the Tattoo. They found out that the man unwillingly carrying the Tattoo on his back is named Paul, and he's been an unwilling participant in the Tattoo's cruelty for years.
They soon found out that Grisamentum had ordered the Krakenist church to be attacked, and most of its members were slaughtered, including the Tuethex. Dane was devastated, and admitted to Billy that all along he had been working with the Tuethex's blessings. Save, of course, for inviting Billy to come with him. In the aftermath, Dane assumed a position of leadership amongst the surviving Krakenists. Billy realized from the stolen library as well as assorted little paper birds left scattered around the church that Gris has actually become ink. After his body was burnt, Byrne turned the ashes into the ink that he was living on through. Billy boiled down the ink they could salvage off the paper birds, and interrogated Grisamentum by writing with his essence like Byrne had. The small piece of Grisamentum they had was vague and difficult, but Billy managed to make the connection that Gris planed to use the ink of the kraken to make himself, essentially, a god. By writing in the ink of a god, he could rewrite the world.
Dane and the remaining Krakenists decided to invoke a religious rite and become Krakenbit to combat Gris, which would grant them holy powers but would also change them permanently. Billy begged Dane not to, but was unable to convince him. In the end, he decided that if he couldn't change Dane's mind, he'd support him in his intended assault on Gris's workshop. The Londonmances, Billy and the Krakenbit, who have become half-human-half-squid monsters, attacked Grisamentum's forces the next day, but ultimately they failed. Grisamentum killed Dane during the course of the battle, Billy being unable to stop it, and then he discovered where the giant squid was being hidden.
Billy quickly constructed a plan to have the sea take back the kraken, since the sea was still ultimately neutral and Gris wouldn't risk invading it. With the help of a mostly recovered Simon Shaw, the kraken was transported into the Embassy of the Sea, which appeared as an underwater flat visible through a pane of glass below the harbor. Gris, however, was undeterred by the sea's neutrality and broke into the embassy, draining it of seawater. Billy was joined by Collingswood and Saira in the confrontation with Gris, but he reached the squid before they can stop him. Byrne used her magic to bring the squid partially to life, just enough to get it to produce ink. Gris then infected the ink of the god-squid, and began to rewrite rules. Billy only defeated him by redefining the squid, not as a god, but as his own bottled and preserved specimen. It robbed Gris of all his power, and he ceased to be entirely.
However, this did not avert the end of the world. Everyone could still feel it approaching, and Billy and Collingswood suddenly realized it's Vardy who's actually been causing all of this. The squid was just a bystander, and the real threat was Vardy noticing the Beagle specimens, and the research he had been doing on a sort of memory fire that erases from memory and reality all that it consumes. He planned to reboot reality and burn away the theory of evolution in order to recreate a world where a strictly literal Christian god still existed for him. However, without evolution, there would be no world, and no chance of a new one rising from the ashes.
Billy demanded that Simon beam him into the Darwin Center, even though it would kill him, so that he could stop Vardy. The last thing Billy will remember is the sensation of being torn apart.
