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

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

Time, and the weird pseudotemporal pseudocircular bullshit Battles tended to inflict on their participants, hadn't been kind to This Kracht. Physically, he was still the flawless crystal constant any geologist would kill for a sample of, but Kracht had (in all his iterations (that he'd lived to reflect upon)) always felt the first time round had been the toughest, without even factoring All-Stars into it. The cameo round had been a particular kind of existentialist horror, which only got worse once all the old faces became familiar enough that he recognised new ones trickling in every couple of iterations.

He got used to it, though. It helped in a recursively heartwrenching way that he never saw Emma again, nor did anybody he ever talked to recognise his description of her. He could question whether the thousand deaths of Jen and Arkal and the others were actually things that had happened, on whichever string of existence was arbitrarily the one that mattered. He could feel omniscient and inconsequential within his extended nightmare, and not have to fight the Hand of Silver's ubiquitous squriming digits at every turn.

This Kracht hadn't suffered that disenchantment. Owen still remembered the electric roiling that thrashed its way up through him, juddering up through the radii of cracks he'd punched into Xadrez' chessboard. Her hand, gripped so hard at his hilt she'd die before she relinquished him, pounding with blood. Then blood and adrenaline, then just adrenaline, once the screaming hole through her shoulder finished sobbing its heart out at what they'd all done. This Kracht still fought for their memory, and hadn't yet had that memory bastardised a thousand iterations over.

Time, in all its screwed-up callousness, hadn't been kind to this Kracht. Yet.

With all the brash and youthful rage of a man who didn't understand the way the world worked (how it worked was you'd keep living, even when everyone you loved couldn't anymore), This Kracht marched into the Grove, looking for Moses.

The Princess was dead - had died a long time ago, by any linear standard of the word, most likely. Didn't mean Kracht didn't owe her this. Wasn't like Emma had screwed him over, given him a chance to fix everything. Not just yet.

The glade was purple, under the glossy deep reddish of the canopy and with the prickle-less thistles amongst the roots, the two linked by trunks with moss the colour of a bruise just before it hurts to touch. Kracht plucked a mulberry-hued bloom on a low-hanging branch, and for want of a nose couldn't smell some stranger's home in there.

"Kracht." It was a question, clad in enough officiousness to make it fact. Moses didn't normally resort to such tactics, but this was wartime. The air thrummed with the wings of bees and hummingbirds, and Kracht felt an impatient distant drumming of the Place through his feet, impacting where his stomach should've been.

"Moses," murmured Kracht, staring uneasily about the throng. He caught the tortoise's eye. "Moses?"

Kracht took a few slow steps, then fell to one knee - a little clumsily, sure, but he couldn't recall having voluntarily knelt for anything or anyone. If someone fell, you didn't stop. You grabbed them by whichever hand was more gloved against your radiation, and you kept running. He glanced about again, an attunement to the temporal that was so close to foregone telling him something was amiss.

He pressed on, anyway.

"Moses," Kracht began, "J- the princess is dead. I'm... I'm not really sure when she left here, but I promised myself I'd see her home safely."

"I failed her, Moses. I failed you as well, as her friend. And I'm sorry."

"I'm so sorry."

---

Xadrez drummed his fingers on his chessboard, glaring at the phone for lack of a less juvenile reaction to being cut off. The youngest Norn was still watching him, so he carefully placed the phone back on its plinth.

You look as bored of all this as I feel

what do you make of it, Fate

She blinked, not expecting to be addressed, and glanced back to the sitting room. Threads of life interlinked her trailing fingers, already entangling and congealing in spite of the gunmental glint of the Undercurrent upon them.

In this strange land
you are stranger
we chase the wondrous threads like you
with barbs and burrs, that snag, coerce so many other threads
the Agents in our tapestry
the warp or weft
the party line
but what is found is no beginning
a separate River, to wit

So you know nothing of my history before-

But that is the thing
would catch our conscience
We've not dredged the River for you
For Ti-a says you're much the same
As the liege of the merwitch queen

The phone rang, and the two spirits glanced at it together. Kajura motioned to it, but Xadrez was already thinking. Kajura watched and waited, toying with the fibres at her fingertips like a game of cat's crade. The tactician saw some pattern in her dancing digits, and flicked a gentle dismissal to the telephone before bidding her continue. She smiled into her little web, speaking more to it than Xadrez.

Wove Ti-a, he was her mastermind
A warlord from beyond
When the Tyrocean's beasts and the millionteeth
of her dragons flailed and cracked
She served to him a demon's neck
upon a silver platter
And the demon
on his ebon saucer served the witch in turn

Ring, ring, ring.

He brought resources - hers - to bear
turned the tides, no less, bore them down upon the Place
but never bore his burdens well
like spawn of daws and vultures
they fought
nemeses between campaigns
skirmishes, and seiges
Until the mound of common foes rose to meet the steps
to the palace, burn down its doors
and claim, at last, her crown

That

That barely begins to make sense, growled Xadrez. You speak of all this as if it were the past, yet-

"Oi. Hate to cut you off, but it's his Highness on the other end here."

The phone had stopped ringing, but a rather ugly grub had stuck its head out of the earpiece, glaring without eyes somewhere to the left of Xadrez. It twitched a stubby leg in what might've been a jab over its shoulder at the Echoak telephone.

"He's looking for the Librarian, and he's pissed off as fuck. Either of you seen him?"

---

"Th- that can't be right."

Moses glared witheringly over his spectacles. "The past is immutable, Kracht. Moreover, I was there personally."

"But we killed Xadrez! I was there personally!"

This was... too absurd. Xadrez had never made mention of having had any association with the Place, and in his stupid naivete Kracht had let the ghost tell him at some length about his goals and history. Xadrez had told Kracht a lot of things, including how he'd make a fine chess set of the rock if Kracht ever crossed him - all in all, Kracht had vastly preferred being a sword to being a token on a game board. He'd never mentioned the Place - even the twisted hateful mockery of himself that jeered and goaded the princess in that final round couldn't tell her they fought for nothing, that he'd crossed the multiverse already and tore apart her home before the battle had begun.

Because it hadn't happened? Because the only alternative was where, of anyone that could've cheated death, cheated the battles, and lived out his days content playing generals and ruining lives, it had to be him? How could the big, unfeeling, uncaring multiverse have conspired in its dark corners to make it him?

Of all the beings, after fighting his way through All-Stars and All-Stars All-Stars, with the first rare glimpse of hope come the endgame that there might be some good left in the world - that maybe he could even stir up hope this was her Place, and maybe even hope against hope that she might be here herself, that this was the past and the Amalgam's spite would only make him fight all the harder for seeing her again?

After all that, it had to be him?

Kracht glanced up, found his fist in a tree, and leveraged it out. Moses had waited politely enough, but unreadable to Kracht was the tortoise's measuring of its words.

"I daresay it's in your interests to know, Kracht. Xadrez contacted me not moments ago."

What?

"What?"

"It is a truly discomfiting thought, yes. Worse, he's in the Library. Killed the Librarian already, we fear."

Kracht only remembered one story about the Library from Jennifer. It was enough to know Xadrez' being there - killing people - was bad. Really bad. "Shit. I'm going after him."

Moses didn't look especially surprised, which really only registered in Kracht's peripheries. He still had no idea how he was going to stop Cedric, let alone defeat the Ovoid or the Hand of Silver, but Xadrez he could handle. Emma knew the plan; could look after herself if Cedric had no intention of killing her.

Moses conferred in a low voice with a hummingbird, which buzzed over and settled on the shoulder of Kracht's bandolier. It had a purple flower in its beak.

"Zhizz'ere'z a Homesick Honeyzuckle," explained the hummingbird. "It grew'n bloomed in th'light of th'sun what which shone in the Ol' Gen'rill's world. We were gonna send it 'im, zeeing's he jez' wann'd ter find 'iz way home, but then he went'n murdered the Liberian. Idiot. Might help yer take 'im down a notch. Might not."

"Mozzes, zhir," grumbled another, that had just hovered its way beside the tortoise's ear, "The rezzt of th'Virate've azzembled a fleet in Aubergine Bay. Take'z many'z the shipz'll handle, cross the Tyrocean t'zhomewhere ellzwhere. They've zhent a carriage t'leave pozthaste."

Moses nodded, and pre-empted Kracht's question. "Very well. Kracht, the Library is concealed in the Feethills, a half-day's march and the folowing of a tenuous, constantly-climbing track which you'll have to trust is there. It'll be the first path your feet take you down, so you shall not miss it lest the gods conspire to their own demise. If my people give them advance warning, the trip should take a man of your constitution a mere several hours."

"Right. I'll do what I c-"

The sound of metal on metal, with something organic trapped inbetween, tore through the air and left the edges on everything raw. The horizon, by now tinged with smoke and the too-sharp reflections steel and glass, seemed to skew and twist around, dragging the earth underfoot with it.

Everything settled, but the ragged quality remained in the air, and the distant clang and crunch of the Silver City had taken on a new inescapability.

Kracht got back up to his feet, and stared up at the Library, mind racing.

Xadrez, what the hell do you think you're doing?

---

About ten minutes prior, Hector had let the wood-boring wasp shelter in his cloak; it'd only get itself killed if it flew off into the Silver City. He grabbed the phone as soon as its progeny stuck its grubby little head out, and ignored its displeasured squeal as he roared into the conch's depths.

"What the fuck are you playing at, Librarian!?"

Playing

me

Is that what I'm doing now

You might be onto something there

Hector ducked out of sight as something screeched above; an overpass crashed into a rainbow and sprayed concrete and gold everywhere. He hissed into the shell again as soon as the coast was clear. "Don't give the King your cryptic bullshit! This is war! Get the Middle-Gem to safety, if Hoss' minions hunt you down the Place is done-"

How about

you stop for a moment, your highness

take pause, consider

the relative importance of all of this - Xadrez waved the phone about to nobody's benefit, his other hand gently fingering the Middle-Gem shaped weight in his chest - in the grand scheme of things

I do not, as should be obvious, trust the green devil

"What the fuck are you talking about-"

but if he lied about this future being a mere parable

an object lesson

what then?

Is this real? does this change anything?

Who

cares

what any future holds, real or not, when, moreover

even the Grandmasters cannot change the past, it seems

They will not - can not - return her to me

So what should I care of this diversion

delusion

distraction

from the fact that nothing in this wide awful world deserves to be spared from burning to the ground

Xadrez idly spun the black disc beneath him, marvelling at how quickly he'd lost track of it without the knife, lost all the notation that encircled each piece. The Middle-Gem's pulse, slow as a planet's heartbeat, was washing out whatever vestiges of memory he had tied to the board.

"Who- who the fuck are you!? Is this some kind of game to you? When I find out who you are-"

The tactician arrested the black with a grip upon its rim, leaning into examine a metalloid smudge by his palm. Structure, crystalline - all glints and right angles. His hand beside it hummed alarmingly, like two vibrations approaching a glass-shattering harmony. His other put the phone down, flicked off the last few pieces still somehow hanging on to the board, gripped some ridge or nodule of the metal in one of those moments of vertiginous clarity, and-

twisted. Spun his disc full circle, dragging the smudge in a perfect circumference.

Xadrez felt rather than heard a city's ever-encroaching borders warping, enclosing this pittance of a world this king held so dear. The Middle-Gem bobbed about, vacillating between a lump in his throat and a knot in his stomach as the Library's altitude adjusted. When everything calmed down, he drifted to the nearest window, and the Place radiated outward like a tree stump under ultraviolet light. Beyond its meadows and forests and dales, though, the steel and smoke and glass was omniprescent and creeping inward no matter which direction you cast your eyes in.

A spire, at the peak of which rested the Middle-Gem, radiating upon the Place the order du jour. The Place encircling, and smoke and concrete marching in from the peripheries. The sacrilege wasn't lost on Xadrez, who interpreted the layout as some subconscious admission to himself of his guilt in how things had played out. Kajura picked up the phone, handed it back to him. Xadrez felt oddly calm, the same sort of calm that a pivot might have felt as the world spun around it.

Remember, your majesty

Its not about whether you win or lose

not to me, at any rate

He tossed the phone out the window, and closed his eyes to the soon-immolated idyll. The industrial chorus wasn't actually in earshot, but the tactician had little else to do but wait.

For the game's end or his demise, he didn't know. Or care.