The Grand Battle II! [Happy End!]

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

"I anticipated something like this," grumbled the Diarist, tossing Mrs Dorcy a plain key. "That's for personal use only. If you must seek refuge in my domain, you're to wait in silence until your master retrieves you."

"Understood."

"Don't expect charity like this often. It's merely so I remain in your master's good graces."

The servant smirked, but the Diarist's myriad limbs had already returned to writing. A quill flecked ink as he waved a dismissal. "I'd have expected no less of you," retorted Mrs Dorcy.

Frank leaned against the Diarist's door, working her shoulders with trepidation as she tried (and failed) to dislodge the dread that had settled in there. It had been creeping in since Jessamine's death (marked less by a sound than a sensation subtle and jarring as the prickle of stone splitting), growing only worse while she distracted herself with the Diarist's ever-caustic company.

Jessamine was dead. That should've been cause for celebration, but for her servant's meddling. Paris' blindness and its crutch - gifts both from his mistress, and Paris had bequeathed the latter to the Faceless. The Speakeasy's veneer might've been the Observer's aesthetic ideal, but the mundane machinery (mundane as the workings of a pocket dimension could be) had fallen into the neurotic, meticulous, murderous talons of Jessamine. She maintained that machinery in her own image - that of a monster constantly commissioning a new face for itself. But Jessamine was dead. And her servant (also dead) had, with deliberate cunning or not, palmed off the last vestiges of the proprietress's influence to something which hated structure and intention and order on a level so deeply personal as to be subatomic. If Frank wanted to think about it like that.

Point was, things were about to get bent out of shape. Frank (sensitive as she was to the context of any place she might find herself) felt it like an aching in her joints. The ache was like a lack-of-pulse; the never-beating non-existent heart of something whispering in her knuckles and shoulders and neck about what was going to happen. Whispering away with its heart in its throat.

Frank shivered a bit. The key in her pocket had stopped tugging in a tangible direction, now more along the tune of somewhere that had done much in the last few moments to make itself quite distant. She ran.

---

"Gestalt, dear, wait." Clara's voice ricocheted around in her skull like a bullet; she winced. "What..." happened. The scene the nun woke up to certainly needed an explanation.

Gestalt wanted nothing more than to hang, draw, and quarter Lucian without delay, but Clara's confusion couldn't be ignored. The schrotgolem was lost in thought for a moment, trying to figure where best to start.

you summoned a grandmaster it finally began. it offered to send us to a place we may confront the observer if

if we agreed

The schrotgolem's attention slunk along the line of plinths, like a gaze averted. Clara's rested on Maxwell, several feet away. There was silence for another while.

"... well? Did it make good on its promise?"

The words still drifted out, just as measured and sparkling; a betrayal to Gestalt's epiphany.

no

There was no outward dejection, which stung the schrotgolem even worse. it was always it seems the observers intention that this be our last location

his domain

"Did it help at all then?"

Gestalt couldn't say. Or didn't want to. The book twisted sharply at the schrotgolem's essence; not in the brain-splitting manner when Vyrm'n had clashed with Jessamine, but reminiscent of it. Gestalt dully supposed she'd collided into some unfortunate further off. Considering the clientele, it was hard to muster much sympathy.

if you are fine to move can we please leave

ive had enough of this place

Clara did her best not to glance at the bodies; Gestalt noticed the motion anyway. "I'll be fine. I'd still like to know – justice? I can understand guilt over what happened to Maxwell, but I don't think a vendetta with a second Grandmaster will solve anything-"

i know

An invisible fist slammed the scattered glass, a jolt rippling across the glittering blue. Gestalt immediately regretted it. It sighed, and traced a tendril through again, parting the shards to surface its message.

maxwell is another victim of the grandmasters yes

but his death or vengeance for it makes confronting those monsters no easier

i want justice for vyrmn

there is a man here

lucian

it could be said he was responsible for her being

much by his own design she trusted him he abused that trust and was responsible for destroying that being

i know it doesnt change anything doesnt stop the battles doesnt stop the killing

but

we have enough self styled gods in the grandmasters thinking they can declare who should live or die

if we tolerate their mortal admirers and emulators among our number we will never ever best them

Much of the glass rose, coalescing, around the boxes like a spiral galaxy. One sharp, glittering arm picked up the black orb Vyrm'n had dropped, considering, before packing it into a box.

"Gestalt..." Clara halted, seeing full well how hypocritical yes

i realise it

but even if i cant be at peace with the fact i can understand its my place to die here and vyrmns to fight on

so why shouldnt i pile these unconscionable crimes upon myself before the inevitable

Clara, under any other circumstances, would've tried to dispel her companion's resignation. Still - as much as it was beyond her to not help the little spirit - flickers of something, somewhere else she'd seen or been during her trance had felt so... important. An inexorable need to be somewhere else. Somewhere with somebody in need of her help - an actual somebody, with sorrows and fears and motives Clara didn't need to invert her worldview to get a grip on.

There were other places to be.

The nun wordlessly found her feet, and her book. The lack of any text upon the blank spread (which bookended chapters in her holy tome) the book had flown open upon just reinforced the meaninglessness of it all. Clara whispered her spirit-lens spell, and took a good long hard look at Gestalt. The golem was devoid - drained, it seemed - of any rage or grief or fervour. She saw only overwhelming exhaustion, and that near-universal grim defiance of the living staring down impending death.

Most telling was that indelible obstinance. It was the determination of the living, but not for its own life - that would've been oh-so familiar to Schleier's nun - but for someone else's. She sighed, undid her scrying-spell, and clutched Beginnings and Ends to her tightly.

"All right. If you're determined to see this through - for Vyrm'n, I suppose - I'll help how I can. Only if you've really, truly given up hope, though."

The schrotgolem would've been amused, but for the ink-black hole where its heart should've been. It ran a few exploratory tendrils of consciousness across the wall Paris had entered through, then yanked at something it wouldn't have messed with in any other situation. A bare hallway - a service corridor - stretched beyond the fresh, improbable wound in the wall.

ive done all that i can

i have more conviction now in my need to do this than i have hope left for a miracle

---

It didn't take long.

Unbeknownst to Gestalt, the Speakeasy was shrinking - the safely traversible reigons of it, anyway. The rot - the entropy, so speak - started in its innumerable dark corners and empty rooms, warpping unobserved from conventional (albeit non-Ecuildean) space into Entropic ideal. As the dimension's inhabitants and their various eyes fled, the process accelerated, leaving every door Gestalt brushed against steeped in something intangible and dread-inducing.

Almost every door.

They were all the same uniform slabs to Clara, pockmarks of braille where the handles should've been the only distinction between them in the glow of her conjured light. The schrotgolem's presence lingered on one; seeking out that insidious, sentience-hating corrosion beyond; then failing to find it, pulled the door without hestiation.

Sighs of fog slithered out, tangling about Gestalt's boxes as it tentatively explored the gloom. It heard footsteps, breaking into a run, and pursued it silently with a trio of knives. A sharp twang and crackle sent one blade wheeling under a bench, but the noise did the exact opposite of dissuading the schrotgolem. More sharp implements winged ahead through the mists, boxing its quarry into a corner. It was only after several moments of slowing action, as both parties sniped and swiped to an eventual standstill, that Lucian called through the fog.

"I surrender."