The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Six: Eddelin City]

Jen was alerted to the world still existing by the Observer’s groan, and the slow fade-out of angelic light (a compromise between the “divine radiance” school of angelic and the “cry of a thousand bells and a trillion eyes and wings and flaming wheels” one). The Observer seemed unfazed, only glowing a little for his troubles. He scratched his head, revealing inscribed a chainlike design of overlapping rings and microscopic script all over his hands, the front and the back, around his wrists and the base of his thumb.

“Well,” he declared, stopping Jen in her tracks as she picked herself up and tried to get the jump on the Grandmaster, “Somebody seems to be of the opinion I’ve overstayed my welcome, so I’d best be off. Good luck not getting killed by any more bit characters, ok?”

He half-waved in departure, took a step out of existence, and existence tore his hands clean off. And his eye.

… No, wait. There they were, down there! That old ice queen must’ve set this up for him, one of those “no hard feelings” type of gifts the Observer like imagining as cornerstone to a healthy professional rivalry. Coming on a bit strong, maybe, what with the amputation going several degrees conceptually deeper than he’d anticipated, even from her. Still, this was fixable, if annoying. Hop back, pause Jen, grab his hands (and his eye), undo the traps, go to the Speakeasy, find a nice cold something in some non-Intersticed nook, and wait for Xadrez to blow up Eddelin. Battles proceed as scheduled and we can all laugh about it like old omnipotent murderfriends at the next funeral, hopefully the Charlatan’s.

The Observer stepped back into Eddelin, and took a closer look at one of the multiplying threads around his hand. His eye was flooded with letters of rejection, arcane syllables to the vague tune of lacking the appropriate permissions. He blinked, and tried again with a different binding. It got about as far as “this d’arcanment is currently in use” before his retinas whitescreened again.

Still registering the pain of dismemberment on some level or another, pseudomnipotence lending enough of an outside perspective for the whole thing to still be vaguely bemusing, the Observer figured it ok to an express an “um,” in the general direction of the nearest remotely-sapient thing that wasn’t him.

The roof was deserted. Light wobbled, queasy, around where the Observer had last seen Jen.

From Jen’s perspective, the Observer almost vanished, something cracked like a pylon falling in fast-forward, and four great spines of light came coursing from the four corners of the globe, converging where the Observer’s eye had been not moments before. Space stretched and snapped back into shape, dragging the Observer back in with it (he almost made it look intentional). He blinked a couple of times, exposing a big, satisfying cross-mark on his eyelid, then finally looked at Jen like he’d been miles away.

Jen grinned, then grinned wider as the Observer raised a hand that didn’t do shit to stop her (it instead flared up with a lot of pretty light, snapping the whole thing in several painful directions at once). She charged - he leapt, a too-small hop through space that clipped his flailing hand into a chimney, which exploded into chunks of masonry - but Jen had better things to do, she ran right past him and cleared the side of the building, eliciting shouts from cityfolk who’d heard the chimney, the rest of the fracas apparently on some plane that didn’t attract their attention. She caught a balcony, fell the rest of the way to the street, lickety-slipped through the gathering crowd and straight for the university.

Pang Hall stood where the City met the college, accorded a respectful distance from other buildings by a wide road on the city side and sweeping lawns on the other. It was altogether too municipal to feel like a castle; in the right light it could’ve been a palace.

The entrance foyer was deserted, an edge and unease that reminded Jen of the day she’d come home from some conquest or another and found her Council of Werelocks in the throne room partway through some usurper’s ritual on the Trifleman. The tiny jester’s guilty pleas made her giggle, easy as had his encouragement to take a vacation and take over a neighboring kingdom in strife. Little wordsmith he’d been.

She opened the door a crack and scanned the hall, spotting Koule well underway on the stage but no prominently insubstantial silhouette. There were a bunch of booths overhanging the lecture hall seating - the like you’d figure in a theatre - which seemed more her ghost-general’s style. Jen found a way up, glanced behind her and found no man, mer, or grandmaster in pursuit, then vaulted the stairs two at a time.

“Xadrez! Xadrez!”

---

Backstage, unsurprisingly, had been full of well-wishers and familiar faces, several of which Koule had only properly examined in picto-transcripts - like the thick-bearded Vice-Chancellor (prior to the administrative position, forefront in the field of Archival Dungeoneering) with her handshake that could crush an ink vial. Retired lecturers had turned up, even Ransk of Gulespoor who ran the scrivener’s he used to work at over the summer. It took Koule a lot of rushed apologies and thank yous and yes-see-you-thens to get up on the stage, until Cedarsap, the university’s projectionist, collared him as politely as a half-elf could.

“Oh. Hesod.” Koule, by habit of the last couple of minutes, extended a handshake; the lightwright somehow turned it into a fistbump. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, no, all your slides loaded in as you asked.” The looming projectionist flashed his teeth, and a small ball of light from his fingertip. “Good of you, no pictures to render, done in my sleep, all black-on-white and easy work. Good crowd for you though, Koule. Not just us usual nose-in-bookers.”

Koule followed Hesod’s catlike glance, in the general direction of his audience. Someone guffawed, but the noise didn’t feel all that out of place.

“Right, that’d be my brother, Eselt.” Koule almost sounded apologetic, before catching himself. “He brought his entire theatre troupe along. I suppose I’d best give them a show, right, Hesod?”

“Them yes, and the mariner up in the galleries too.”

“A mer? I have seen rather a few around town today…” Koule frowned, like something was off, and the half-elf clapped an encouraging hand on his shoulder. With his other, he waved down the hall lights, leaving the lectern invitingly lit in centre stage.

“You’ll be fine, yes. They’ll be on your every word easy. You’ll captivate all them, friend, ‘lockers and mockerbirds, bookers and mers.”

“Thanks, Hesod.”

---

“Ladies, gentlemen, distinguished guests-”

“Ah, finally.”

“It’s a real honor to be opening this conference, and I’d like to thank you all for coming, from almost all corners of the globe. If I may, I’d like to dedicate this in - to my father.” The crowd rumbled. “An explorer, an innovator, a man who in a lot of ways was more like a figure of legend, or-” the scholar huffed a compromise betwixt a sigh and a laugh “-one of the more unhurried forces of nature.” One of Eselt’s crew started to applaud, before someone stopped him.

Hesod’s projector clicked, a classical illustration (black and white, for the lightwright’s convenience) of some far-flung, exotic utopia. It got a chuckle from the academics, a pop-science classic as historically sound as Venusian jungle.

“The last of the Enchanted Courts, the lost kingdom of Sanjegoria, endures through cultures the world over as a symbol of peace, progress, and a place considered almost too good to be true. As you’d expect, there’s much mystique and mythos in the court’s unexplained disappearance, and for centuries we had only the spotty records from other nations and their interactions with Sanjegoria. For the longest time, the eminent primary source about the Court’s nature was thanks to the Gilded Period’s Yule Byren, Ambassador of the Fifth Court of Ralthagon-” -click-flick- “who recorded his experiences as an emissary to the Enchanted Court. This lent us an approximate location of Sanjegoria-” -click-flick, a modern world map, a central-continent splash of grayscale helpfully circled- “somewhere in present-day Barrensands, under jurisdiction of the Mamikonean Octarchy.”

“Sanjegorilogy as a scholarly discipline began in earnest about twenty years ago, when archaeo-historians were rocked by the unearthing of verified Sanjegorian ruins during the biennial desert explorations conducted by Nakharis West. While there’s a whole ‘nother rich glut of history to be found in the far-flung - and, often, farfetched - claims staked by self-styled heirs and descendants of the lost court, I believe Magus Gossh-Breen will be telling us more about that in their afternoon presentation.” One of the swaddled-up Mamikoneans waved.

“Save some space on that table of yours,” Kath cautioned to Xadrez, who glanced up from his disc with a twitch of irritation. “If you want to stage a world war here, wait until after we’ve cleaned up.”

I was not-

“Hush.”

“While “Sanjegorian Scrolls” refers to all of the written works recovered from Nakharis West’s dig sites, it popularly refers to the thirty-eight assorted wyrmskin scrolls unearthed from Structure Six, Site Two. These seized the global imagination as a linguistic portal to greater understanding of the lost Court. To this day, they’re still a point of fascination for conspiracy theorists - or linguists and scholars like myself who grew out of being conspiracy theorists.”

Another slide, of something grainy and pockmarked with the visual noise of copies upon copies. The text - a generous term for it, looping diagrams and little sketches enmeshed within, a dense flowchart more like abstract art - blossomed outward from no particular point on the page. Xadrez saw Kath smirk out of the corner of one eye, but Xadrez was already feverishly copying.
“As you can see-” Xadrez hissed as Koule worked the projector, filigree-dense pages flashing by too fast “-the Scrolls can be roughly grouped into three categories based on appearance - eleven mostly-similar patterns, Type A, eleven more that seems to follow this pattern, Type B, and Type C, the miscellany, for the sixteen scrolls which have little in common with each other.”

“That’s a disparagingly brief history of the discoveries that lead into my field of study. The current name for it is Cryptic Linguistics - my colleagues’ naming choice, not mine, I swear - but you’d be half-right calling me any of a Sanjeographer, Graphemic Theorist, Classical Anullexographer, or even a Softcore Epigraphist.” Someone in the crowd whooped, probably wherever Eddelin East’s head of Geologology had seated themselves. “Thanks, Guigneiss.”

“Sanjegorilogy is a far more interdisciplinary study than popular culture would lead you to believe, far beyond its two mainstay stereotypes-” click-flick, a collage of cartoons, from campus publications and children’s books for the most part, illustrating- “-historically inaccurate trap-dodging dungeoneers, and conspiracy-theorist cryptographers slaving over texts by torchlight.”

“Like you! Yow!”

“Yes, thank you, Guigneiss, like me. For the newcomers in the crowd - and do stop us scholars today if we veer into technical language too sharply - I should note it’s a particularly rare honor a linguist like myself be keynote speaker for the symposium. My name is Koule, I’ve travelled here from Sidant University, and today, I’m here to share with you the fruits of a five-year collaboration - what we believe to be a definitive, if currently-incomplete, deciphering of the Sanjegorian Scrolls. Now, as I hope to show you, the quirks of Sanjegorian orthography makes it quite difficult to immediately use what we’ve found in other excavated texts, but some of my colleagues will be talking later on the potential avenues-”

Xadrez half-wheeled just enough to give Kath his gloweringest profile. I do wonder your majesty
is a lecture hall’s worth of pontifications upon some dead kingdom’s ledgery truly the best use of our time
Did you seek dulcet witterings as mere backdrop to our intensely conversing
even
dare I suggest it
a heart to heart
mutually assured cardiac clawings-at
vying to see who interrogates their way past the sternum first

The chessmaster smoothed the front of his robes down, one hand still scribbling with knife all the while. He turned back to the lecture, ignoring the slam of a door.

It was a joke, your highness
in case I was somehow unclear

“Xadrez! Something happened to the Observer and oh my fucking god you have got to be joking-”

Kath waved, flicking it into a throat-slitting movement with the kind of practiced seamlessness you only get through life with two sets of lower body. “That’s a nice look for you, Jennifer.”

Xadrez spun around properly this time, giving Jen his longest-suffering look before returning to Koule’s talk of gerunds and grammar.

What of her

I sent her an invitation to this lecture
though she’d have an even more wilting view on all this scroll-gazing than I
For all his enthusiasm the man below has eyes and words only for his deskbound adventures in code cracking

At this rate I’ll decipher those scrolls myself before he reads a single line off them

Kath’s possessions (sword, whip, pouch, pelt) were heaped at the edge of the pool, maybe three paces from Jen. Grabbing the sword before Kath could swim over was a dicey proposition, and Xadrez’ knife would make short work of it even if she did. The mertwat was looking at Xadrez (trying to wrap his head around Koule’s explanations of “circumferential clause separation”) with an expression like Yuletide had come early.

“Xadrez, you better be fucking listening, something happened to the Observer and I think he’s-”

Behind her, the Grandmaster sprang into being, incandescent and murderous. The streams of text had multiplied, searing and straining against his every movement. Xadrez flinched, but it was at some exposition of Koule’s; he took the obstinate time to commit his thoughts to disc-paper before finally addressing the commotion behind him.

I thought your allies were tasked with distracting her, not-

The Observer waved a hand, which only served to throw shadows across the water. By this point frustrated, he dug the fingers of his left hand into the mess of runes engloving his right, peeling away the abjurations as Kath threw up her own.

Jen got a glimpse of scorched and blackened digits, their skin already regenerated back in the instant it took for the Observer to join them in a snap-

---

The thespian portions of Koule’s audience were, by this point, mostly asleep. Eselt still seemed attentive, though, and the academics were all nodding along, so Koule wasn’t bothered. There was a strange light coming from the mer’s gallery, a glow like a familiar face - the face of someone he knew next to nothing about, save for their intercession into his life being nothing but good.

Then the light exploded, taking a chunk of terrace with it. If any actors slept through that, the Vice Chancellor’s yell as plaster, water, and a mer fell on her in quick succession did the job just fine. Hesod was stage left in a flash, restoring the lights a little too fast, throwing the hall into even more disarray. Koule, mental brakes still squealing, felt the wash of magic as the half-elf, too slow, yelled his name in warning.

Time didn’t freeze, but it did slow down to the point you’d need a god’s eyes to notice the difference. The Observer took a deep breath, strode past Jen and over the water to the now-empty robe as it dangled off a bit of rubble. Black shards of rock glittered under(sigil-bound)foot.

“Well,” said the Observer, “congratulations, Jennifer Tull! Being the second-most dangerous immediate threat to my existence, you’ve survived and won the Grand Battle!”

Jen couldn’t actually turn to look at the Grandmaster, caught as she’d been mid-lunge for Kath’s sword. The last of the water in the lower pools trickled out, and miles away a projector clicked over. “Seriously, great effort. Like you said, it’s a real shame we couldn’t have something a bit more climactic, but what can you do, right?”

“I guess there’s All-Stars, if you’re still keen for that sort of thing by the time that rolls around. Oh, right! There’s an All Stars. Awesome of me to tell you.”

The Observer waved at the Eddelinites below. Xadrez’ knife was sticking out from under some debris, and he gingerly pulled it free with two fingers. The faterobes’ glow was fading, dull against the angry white-gold mesh of light around the Grandmaster. It also seemed the sort of thing he shouldn’t leave lying around, so the Observer picked that up, too.

“Not to fret - I’ve got your back, seeing as you’re now my champion and all. No need to thank me! You’ll have plenty of time to yourself before all that happens. Now, I’ve got a bit of spellery to untangle before I can send you home, so sit tight and wait until I’ve got everything arranged.”

Jen was about a centimetre closer to the sword. At this rate, she might actually manage to nab it before he was done talking. The Observer was playing the crowd, giving Kath a friendly warning that they really should stop running into each other, tossing the knife Xadrez’ knife into the air and catching it, its glint in the corner of her eye the only thing Jen could actually perceive.

A piece of stone, black as rage, shifted under the Observer, sending more wreckage askitter. He fumbled the knife, almost dropping it over the edge, but something grabbed it.

The threads of fate twitched, the obsidian shards rose from the floor, and something brought the dagger down, carving a bloodless path through gold thread and teal thread and clean through to an entity made of anything but flesh.

The Observer staggered back.

His power, straining as it had against the cursive cursework, burst gleeful forth at the break in the lines - but so too did his essence. The intact inscriptions about him clenched, the broken chessboard’s fragments drifting together, filling out the discarded robe. His time-stop wavered at the shock, granting everyone a disorienting two seconds of unleashed momentum, Jen seizing the sword out of the corner of his eye.

Severed threads of magic curled up, but not rendered inert - they tensed, and the Observer could tell they were waiting for one more intrusive excuse in their reality to burrow into his fresh chest-hole.

Glaring at the hovering knife, a fist twitching in spite of all good sense to see if Jen would be more amenable to disintegration, the Observer stripped a hand clean of sigilry and snapped his fingers. He vanished.

The gold mesh lingered in the air like a lacy skeleton; Jen managed to run over and stab it before it, too, vanished in pursuit.

Jen and what must’ve been Xadrez looked at each other, as the audience lurched back into (com)motion downstairs. The fragmented disc eventually settled into another hovering upper boy, though no individual chip kept still within those confines.

“So,” Jen eventually began, not even sure if the ghost could acknowledge her. “Breaking your disc doesn’t kill you. Good to know.”

Wrong
I think

No
I definitely drifted off there for a moment

I believe
my state of existence
simply appears to have fallen outside the Observer’s purview

Realisation dawned on Jen. “You signed your fucking. soul. to sea-Satan. She-Satan.”

I’ll admit
It wasn’t that bad

I anticipated some dread of failure like I had my on my first deathbed
maybe a flashback or two
But
truthfully
some small part of me was content at the prospect
to be free of all the compounding obligations
to leave it all in the hands of you and Her Majesty

“But now your undying soul is cursed for-fucking-ever to serve her. Great job, Xadrez. Your forefront commitment to killing the Grandmasters instead of preserving your own hide is truly commendable.”

to the Crown, actually, Xadrez hummed. He tried rapping his fingers on his board, but his arm just kind of dangled instead. Honestly

I go following in your allegiance-pledged footsteps every which way at once
let the door hit death on my way out
strike a tangible a blow on our captor
and you’re still impossible to please, Jennifer Tull

Jen nearly rolled her eyes clean out of her skull. The knife whimpered.