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

In those days

In those days

Muninn had a certain way of beginning a story, or, in this case, to re-enter a story midstream. He bat you mercilessly down into the past—or not the past exactly, but some sort of sensually, emotionally charged hyperpast, a flashback, to be uncomfortably precise about it.

It is a great king indeed who can command such a memory to fly away—and, yes, a very desperate king who might actualy choose to do so.

Muninn’s in those dayses smelled of breakfasts past and tickled like the ghost of haircuts past against your neck. In those days things were different. Better, maybe? Or worse in a way that bubbles up slow, making you pine for the event rather than the memory. In those days, for one, this fucking raven wasn’t chattering in your ear and you weren’t suddenly conscripted to blow up or otherwise obligated to prevent the blowing up of the moon.

In those days you could have a partridge feast for a jade coin with your face on it, or a wish for a belt-pouch full of emerald dust. In those days men were men because they wanted to be, not because it was cosmic treason to be otherwise. In those days, you’re pretty sure, the omnipotent-ish entities came to you, not the other way around, and, you suspect, there may have been such a thing as home.

In those days that smelled like plants the names and associated smells of which certain romantic authoresses might expect you to remember, there once was a girl: Choo-Choo.

It was not the girl’s birthday, except, perhaps, in some higher symbolic sense; it must have been spring going into summer, anyway, or else that was just her memory of the eerie heat coming out of Klaus’ workshop, emanated perhaps from the artificial sun, or leaking through the walls in order to heat the werephasmid’s cold blood to the optimum creative temperature. It was evening, or else the oppressive walls simply devoured the light, the array of mannequins and unfinished works casting shadows like the silhouettes of bomb victims. The way she remembered it, she’d been walking for a long time. Had she thought at the time, or was she thinking it now, or had Muninn outright asked her whether Klaus might have been tunneling, expanding his domain under her nose?

In any case, through the course of the walk she became acutely aware of her status as a prisoner, on her way perhaps to the chair or the gallows or the guillotine. Cradled in the arms of a parent on the way to the river to be sent away in a basket. She’d gotten worse birthday presents.

The present was shaded by a thick wool blanket. It didn’t look like a guillotine. A bedpost, maybe, or a headless camel. Jen forgave herself for not thinking very well, because she had, after all, been drugged or poisoned half to death by Klaus’s toy soldiers over the past weeks.

Klaus circled the present, wobbling back and forth in that vaguely cute insectoid way. “My greatest creation,” he announced. “True to life, with nothing but your memories as reference.”

He unveiled the two bodies. They smiled and waved.

“It’s so good to see you,” said Mom, her voice full of splinters.

“Mom,” said Jen. It wasn’t quite the mom she remembered. There were cracks in the grain of the wood around the eyes, and she was maybe ten percent less vitally alive than Jen remembered. Shorter, too. Dad, his arm clasped around her waist proprietarily, seemed to have shaved his mustache, and thank the Gods.

“Look how much you’ve grown,” he said.

“And we love your new place.”

Their teeth were wooden, but so, supposed Jen, were George Washington’s, so that was nothing to judge. Jen was wooden too. Frozen. Hollow. Shaking slightly as though pushed by a breeze.

Dad clapped Jen on the shoulder. Cold and hard, of course. “We’re just so glad to see you again,” he rasped, “And that Klaus has been taking care of you all this time you’ve been… away.” His eyes painted lovingly, same blue as they’d always been, but unmoving and a little too polished.

“And of course there’s no hard feelings about that,” said Mom. “Thinking back on it now… we practically pushed you out the door, didn’t we?”

“In a family like ours, in any family, there are a lot of intense feelings going around. People get pushed to extremes, especially little girls who don’t feel like they can speak up for themselves.”

“But that’s all over now.” A termite emerged from her ear and marched into the wicker weave of her hair. “You’re a woman grown. And your room’s just the way it was.”

Klaus was on the ceiling again. He twitched and wheezed out exuberant pheromones.

“You don’t need to worry about the job,” assured Dad. “We talked it over with Klaus. He can look after things, get someone else to help out maybe.”

“You’ve done so much alre—“

“God,” said Jen. “Shut up, Mom.”

Mom quivered. Klaus creaked.

“And you,” she growled, addressing the werestick. “This is such bug thinking. Bring in the parents, the alphas, and I lose my dominance in the hierarchy, right? Then you ship me on my way and take over without having to bother with an assassination. That’s the kind of plan you come up with when you’ve been studying human families in zoos.”

Toy-Mom reached out to embrace her. Jen ducked behind the wooden soldier, grabbed its leg, and twisted. There was a sound like a tree falling in the forest, but she barely heard it in her rage.

“I escaped the zoo years ago, Klaus.” Mom hit the ground, her leg tearing off at the knee. Dad charged, his head hitting Jen full in the stomach, knocking her against the wall.

“It was a mistake coming here,” said Dad. “You’re still just a little brat in need of discipline—”

Jen whacked him in the face with Mom’s arm several times, beating him back. “This was not how my parents actually talked, by the way,” the queen said to nobody in particular, as if trying to remind herself.

Dad punched her square in the jaw—which she was still incapable of actually expecting—and she fell right into the arms of her one-legged mother, who pinned her to the floor, nutcracker mouth gnashing wildly.

“You’re a failure,” the toy shrieked. “A disappointment! Always let your imagination run wild. We were waiting until high school to tell you that wouldn’t get you anywhere in life!”

She was impossibly strong—which was an unfair thing to say, Jen supposed, seeing as she had no idea what actually powered these things’ movements—stronger anyway, she was certain, than her actual mother had been. Jen screamed magic words in every dialect, calling out to gods, devils, primal elemental forces, friends, heroes, swords. Odd bolts of energy whizzed through the room and mostly blew up stray bits of furniture, which was how the higher beings signified that they were waiting to see how this turned out and didn’t want to pick sides at the moment.

Dad began kicking her side. One of her ribs broke. Finally she resorted to empty threats directed at Klaus. “I am the queen of this Place, daughter of the sun and moon,” she intoned, as grandiose as she could through the agonizing pain. “These people were nothing but biological catalysts. You think their image gives you power over me?”

“Don’t trivialize my masterpiece!” retorted Klaus from the ceiling. “Surrender into mother’s arms. It’s your mammalian instinct, impossible to resist. Think of Christmas, mac and cheese. Think how she cried for you, first day of kindergarten.”

Christmas, age nine: they got her a telescope, which she denounced as “bullshit” because she couldn’t see outer space the way it looked in the textbooks and posters. Outer space full of colors, fire, an endless expanse of the unfathomable. The telescope turned dots in the sky into bigger spots in the sky.

Mac and cheese: Kraft “the Cheesiest.” Counterintuitively, warping it into ninja turtle shapes made it taste worse. It’s impossible to get the best of both worlds.

Life lessons.

First day of kindergarten. Andrew Malette told her she couldn’t play with him because she was a girl, so, as she explained to the principal later: “I punched him in the dick.” She was punished worse for saying “dick” than for the punch because acts of violence are more-or-less isolated but words spread, circulate, a worm you can never put back in the can.

At some point in her reminiscences, she had lost the ability to breathe through Mom’s embrace.

Finally Dirk came, the trusted (um) dirk clattering as though thrown down the stairs into the room and then rolling, improbably, into Jen’s hand. It was good to have friends. She stabbed Mom in where her real mother might have had a hamstring, plunging Dirk deep into the wood with a crack.

“DIE, you faux-matriarchal bitch,” said Dirk, expressing his anger as he’d been instructed in therapy.

Jen found no hamstring but evidently caused Mom enough surprise to release her grasp. Jen rolled to her feet, taking a few deep breaths before bringing Dirk up to counter the back of Dad’s hand.

“Dirk, can you still do that one thing?” the queen coughed as Mom crawled towards her and Dad pulled off his own left arm to use as a bludgeoning weapon.

“Haven’t tried in a while,” admitted Dirk, acknowledging his limitations. “We’ll see.”

“Try.”

As it turned out, Dirk could still do the thing—the thing where fire shot out of him and immolated Jen’s toy-soldier parents. Dad died within seconds: Mom managed to eject her head and throw it away from the blaze, rolling sheepishly into the corner.

“I’ll deal with you later,” Jen told Klaus, pointing Dirk menacingly. “I’m your mommy now, and I devour my young, so happy fucking birthday.

“Dirk? Phone mode.” Jen held the sword up to her ear. “Get me Moses.”

“Yes, mi’lady?” came the voice of the tortoise, evidently surprised.

“Rid my castle of these toy soldiers. They’ll probably resist, so don’t be afraid to get rough with them.”

“I’ll send a detachment right away, mi’lady.”

“Damn straight.” Jen hung up. She stood and looked at the fire for a bit, and then pointedly looked away from the fire, letting its heat and the thrill of victory rush over her. Or waiting for it to do so, anyway. She still felt hollow.

She picked up Mom’s head. “Tell me, Mom,” she asked. “Did you ever love me? Did he build a heart into you?”

Mom tilted her chin, indicating a willingness to shrug, despite a lack of shoulders. “Kinda?” it offered.

Jen threw it into the fire. “Stupid piece of shit,” she said.

“What’s bothering you?” asked Dirk. “You can talk to me. Don’t keep your worries to yourself.”

“I dunno,” she admitted, walking out of the burning workshop. “Dammit. I think I want to go home.”

* * * * *

”And the idea would not leave the young queen’s head from that moment on. You see, in those days—“

But before Muninn could finish his wearying, depressing, and ambiguously true tale, the train reached its stop. Or, put more bluntly, it rammed into the moon.

Ding! Ding! Ding! rang the intercom helpfully. The door slid open. There was no whoosh of decompression, nor, thankfully, did Jen asphyxiate and die. The astronaut helmets, apparently, were just for show. Typical of the Amalgam’s pretensions of perfect, ruthless efficiency: it was all about perception. Even to the platonic form of human in its infinite, gooey aspect, the symbol of “astronaut” still held some appeal.

Jen stepped out of the train fairly confident that she could take care of this whole blowing-up-the-moon thing as a quick detour towards saving this version of the Place, ruining the battle and, most importantly, getting rid of this fucking bird. Her confidence level dropped precipitously when she saw Sir Cedric, dressed to the nines in a gaudy silver-and-red spacesuit, addressing the crowd of fragments. She kept to the back.

”Alright, men,” began the knight, ”You’ve been selected for this mission because you’re the best! Well, not because you’re the best, but because everyone is the best, and your names came up. Not that you have names…”

Cedric paused and looked over the fragments, beard twitching faintly in disgust. You’re going to die here Jen

”Point is, you’ve been selected for the mission, so do the damn mission.”

The Amalganauts saluted as one and took off to their task, pulling oversized explodey-looking devices from the rear of the trainrocket. “Explodey-looking devices” rather than “bombs” given that they were very gaudy and shiny and lacked the brute functionality of anything that Jen would properly call a “bomb.” bedecked with valves and panels and graceful little arcs of wire in pink and blue and yellow, there was an aesthetic about them that Jen could only describe as “sci-fi,” like some mad extrapolation of the idea of The Bomb as it existed in the minds of twentieth-century methheads exclamation-pointing their paranoia onto the pages of comic books.

She didn’t want to know what would happen to them if they went off. You can’t beat him honey he is fire and muscle and Man in the mold of the first heroes a Gilgamesh a Beowulf a Gary Sue less cautionary tale than threat

Shut up, Mom. She counted thirteen of the bombs. Assuming Cedric and his masters are going for a simultaneous detonation, allowing for the fragments to disperse roughly equidistantly to all corners of the moon and coordinate and arm the things, and praying to all that’s good that they do all of this without teleporting… she’d have time. He who slew his golden god of flame and gained a silver patron who consumes with no passion his was the sort of story that was never meant to be true his truth is a flaw in the world in the multiverse you cannot defeat Cedric within Cedric’s story but he can defeat you within yours

“Shut up, Mom!” said Jen, softly but aloud. “I’m trying to help.”

Don’t worry about your old mother dear Jen you knew we weren’t going to be around forever worry about your own life that Hector sure is a nice boy but of course I’m biased I’m his mother too

“That’s really weird, mom. Can you let me in?”

You know you’re always welcome here help yourself to some cheese

The crater opened up—popped, maybe, is a word for what it did, or retreated—and Jen fell smoothly at one-sixth gravity into the welcoming arms of Mother Moon. Muninn, squawking in annoyance, followed her.

The kitchen was vast. Jen could barely reach the counter, where a plate of exotic cheeses, pear slices and Club crackers had been left out for her. There was something off about the house, whether simply a Muninn-induced can’t-go-home-again melancholy or a reminder that this wasn’t her moon, exactly, but another one. “Mom, what was my favorite color growing up?” she asked between bites of Cheddar Than Thou.

Why purple of course would you like to see your room I haven’t changed a thing since you left to go see that bitch my heheh competition that human whore who never loved you

“Things have changed.”

I should imagine what with you wandering off to other planes without your father in the sky to mark time by during the day or your mother to light the way at night

“It’s just that I like green now, as it so happens.”

Well that’s a quick fix just don’t go into the room for about a minute

Mom could always be depended on to assume that any slightest vocation of displeasure was grounds to fuss about her room and buy her all new clothes. It was grating, but in this case, about to face down certain death by omniknight, she would allow herself to be coddled. Mother Moon chatted idly, her voice always coming from just around the corner or down the hall.

Sure you must have heard those nasty rumors about me ‘formed when a Mars-sized mass collided with the Earth’ why I never

“You know what scientists are like, Mom,” called Jen.

They’re fixated on me for whatever reason Okay your room’s ready

Jen—and, apparently, her alternate-whatever counterpart—had never actually lived on Luna Lane for a long period, so the room was sparsely decorated, but it had all the amenities, all of which, it became evident as soon as she walked up the stairs and turned the corner, were now green. Pillow stuffed with hummingbird-down and cloudstuff, blanket sewn from the skin of her slain enemies. Muninn flopped against the memory-foam mattress and cawed contentedly. Jen walked right by. The important thing was in the closet.

Jen’s best battledresses were at once ceremonial and practical, formal and casual, protective, elegant, and, in a pinch, functioned as pajamas. There were six in the closet, a more traditional suit of plate armor loitering against the wall, and some tee shirts and pants folded up neatly in the dresser. All of it prestidigitated into a garish emerald. Everything, miraculously, looked like it would still fit.

And then there were the swords—all of the swords. Some of them roused themselves from a years-long sleep and greeted her questioningly, sensing (where, of course, Mom hadn’t noticed a thing) that she was not quite their Jen, though, they consented, she was Jen enough to earn their trust. She turned them all away, displaying the Ovoid-sword to much approval. She looked around for a scabbard that would fit it well, if such a thing existed.

Noticing something, Jen held the four-dimensional sword up to the overhead light. Its shadow hung on the wall… and was joined by another shadow. And a third, and fourth. Shadows on the floor, shadows on the ceiling, shadows in her mind. All of them shaped differently. Many of them bore the unmistakable silhouettes of swords she had wielded before.

“Hmm,” mused Jen. “Mom?” she called. “Can you take a look at this sword for a minute? I’m going to take a shower and dress for tonight.”

* * * * *

Hector usually wore fur, devolving it into scale on those occasions when he let rein to his reptilian brain. He slept most nights in straight-off-the-larva silk—all of it, of course, in the natural violet suitable to his position. Possessed of a vague culturally-transcendent awareness that a denuded emperor had some symbolic significance (and he was, technically, an emperor, among the other honoraries that accumulated like dirt under his fingernails), he usually avoided being completely naked for protracted periods.

Which goes to say, when Hector woke up in nothing but his own (distressingly human) skin, he found himself missing his memory.

”Good morning, my liege,” cawed Huginn from the bedstand. ”You have slept for four hours. I have been feeding off of your dreams.”

“Feeding,” repeated Hector weakly. He drew from himself a fattened, contented pig, and then wreathed it in a cocoon of bees. The bees danced salaciously, grinding in an airtight cluster, generating heat. The pig squealed, slow-roasting in the insectoid oven.

”Your subconscious musings have strengthened us for the trials ahead.”

“That’s great, Huginn,” encouraged Hector, monarchically. “Just awesome. Where’re my clothes?”

“You fell asleep pretty fast,” called an unfamiliar voice from the bathroom. “You had a big day, I guess.”

Emma sidestepped onto the threshold, shimmering in one of Hector’s bathrobes, his toothbrush jammed into her cheek. She studied his face, disappointed.

”You don’t remember me at all, do you?” she asked.

Hector shook his head sadly. He scanned the bed for a second indent, a strand of hair on the other pillow. He had no idea what was going on. It only took a few seconds for his boyish curiosity to overcome his kingly prudence. “Did we—“

He had expected her to interrupt him so he wouldn’t have to go any further than “Did we—“ but she only stared at him for a few seconds, brushing her gums, then spat on the floor and rolled her eyes.

“No. Nooooooo. No we did not—”

“Sorry. I gave my memory to another girl. I mean, not, like, another girl, but, like, a girl, other than you—“

“You explained it last night. And you also told me that I would forget, and that I should remind you to consult the parrot.”

”Squaaaaawk Consult the parrot!” confirmed the parrot, bobbing its head excitedly from atop a lamp.

“Consult the parrot, if you would, my liege,” added Huginn, wanting to appear useful.

“Okay,” said Hector. “Parrot. What did we—“

“Squaaaaaaaaaawk I think the Silver City only spreads while Cedric’s inside of it, so that’ll buy us some time How do I stop it? We haven’t figured out how yet. We’ve seen it consume whole worlds before Well, we’ve got to keep Cedric away from it. Where’d he go again? He went to the moon, Hector. Focus Sorry, there’s this bird that flew a— You told me already Okay. So he goes to the moon because… because the moon or something on the moon can stop him I don’t get it. What’s on your moon? The sun and the moon are the mother and father of the Place. The moon combats the influence of humanity by warping humans into lycanthropes Doesn’t silver counter lichen-whatever anyway? This one time my brother turned into a werelobster and-- We corrected that flaw within local physics. Last time Hoss broke through the borders I parleyed with the Knights of the Periodic Table and, um, did something, I forget So for Cedric to eliminate non-humanity from the place-- He’ll have to do three things. Neutralize the moon—probably destroy it—kill me, and take the Middle-Gem What’s the mi-cough cough cough cough Are you okay? Nope. Dying, actually, but—“

“Stop.” Hector struggled to juggle several concepts continuously in his short-term memory at once.

“Stop!” confirmed the parrot.

“Dying, huh?” Hector’s first impression of Emma—re-impression, he supposed, given his current disability—had been less an insightful character study and more a refamiliarization with certain aspects of human biology he’d convinced himself he didn’t miss. On a closer examination Emma was not, in fact, looking very good. There was a desperate look in her eyes that suggested she was holding her mental state together through sheer will.

Emma shrugged. “I have nieces and nephews,” she said. ”The contestant entered in our first battle was ‘the Broderburgs.’ There’s something larger than myself that’s going to keep on living.”

Hector resisted his royal prerogative to say whatever was on his mind—in this case, that collective identity at the expense of the individual was what gave rise to Hoss; that accepting one’s own death, even for a greater cause, was always weakness, never strength; that the Place had outlasted the rest of the universe precisely because of the individuals within and their sense of Self, their sheer determination to live. It wasn’t what she needed to hear right now, and he didn’t need to say it either, because he knew how she would reply. She would tell him that the bestial desire to live in all things living was how the Grandmasters were able to manipulate the universe’s denizens into tearing each other apart; that his own notion of selfhood was inextricably bound up in the debatably-fictional construct of the body politic, a royal “we”; that he knew nothing of the pains she had suffered, the emotions he had felt; that he was utterly beneath her, a prancing eternal youth, immature, reckless, stupid.

He didn’t know what to believe anymore.

“Why’d you let me sleep?” he asked, mostly to Huginn. “We’ve got to save the moon and the Gem and—and me, right?”

”Our immediate problems are too distant and too dangerous for your highness’ immediate intervention, save that he rest first,” offered Huginn. ”In any case, we have heroes on-site at each of the crisis scenes.”

”My… my friend Kracht is looking after the Middle-Gem, and his old friend Jen--the First, apparently--is headed to the moon to fight Cedric.”

”Jen the First? Isn’t she, like, way dead?”

”Apparently you were fighting alongside her yesterday. She has your Muninn.”

”Fuck.” Hector tried to form a suitable toga out of his blanket, failed, and sat back down on the bed. “And that leaves me to—what? Oversee the dismantling of the Silver City? Or just protect myself?”

”Actually,” corrected Emma. ”I think Huginn meant that I was here to protect you.”

”Heroes come in threes or sevens,” suggested Huginn. ”That Jen, Kracht, and Emma are here suggests that you don’t have a heroic role to play in this particular struggle… unless there are three other heroes we don’t know about yet.”

* * * * *

Simultaneously earlier, later, backwards, meanwhile, next, kind of diagonally sideways, back in the real world, and not actually happening at all, something that could not be contained by any of these qualifiers was starting to rot.

Within a beige space shifting slightly to green, Time and space sort of sagged and started to smell.

”Well,” said Holly. ”There goes the ‘we all die when the round ends’ theory. I think.”

”These could just be the last firings of our brains as our lifesigns faded,” whimpered Jeremy. How would we know if we were dead? Also, who would care?”

”I think,” posited Fantha, vocalizing awkwardly through Sen’s reticent physiology, ”There wouldn’t be much brain left to misfire if our universe had been obliterated. We could be in an afterlife, though.”

”Wait. Waitwaitwait.” Algernon’s devotion to the Cause, or at least the desire to express that devotion through direct action, seemed to have leaked out of him with the death of the Amalgam. ”If we’re in the afterlife and it’s the exact same as where we were except on, like, an alternate plane—but we’re already on an alternate plane—but I mean like we’re already alternate versions of ourselves? And there are all these alternate dimensions and whatever so. Like. What’s the difference?”

”I found the difference,” said Jeremy. He was groping at the beige stuff that at once did not exist and impeded their path wherever they walked-slash-moved in this infinite expanse (from which autumnal branches of World Tree still sprouted, seemingly perpendicular to everything at once), shaping the 4-D sludge into what might charitably be called a sphere.

”It’s a doorknob,” he specified upon noticing everyone looking at him. ”There’s, uh, I think there’s a hole in whatever sort of block who’s-her-face put on my powers way back when. Either ‘cause the round’s over and everyone’s forgotten about us or ‘cause tall, wide, deep, fourth-dimensionally expansive, dark and handsome here broke something when he died.” He traced a rectangle into the beigeness, put a hand to the knob and his ear to the makeshift door. ”I think I can get through into… yeah… anywhere.”

Sen twitched. ”Anywhere?” asked Fantha.

”Let’s see if I can—hmm. Nope. Okay, I can’t find home. And I can’t find my real self, who I think might still be hanging around Endymion. And now I’m ashamed because I was just thinking about killing him so I can be me and don’t have to think of myself as some sort of ancillary thing or just a set decoration anym—“

”Focus, Jeremy.”

”Yeah, sorry. I think what it comes down to is I can get anywhere in any universe the Amalgam’s been to, but nowhere where the big guys have meddled.”

”That will do,” said Fantha. Sen’s hand found Jeremy’s shoulder. ”I need you to take me back to my homeworld. I can get help from there.”

Jeremy gyrated his shoulder uncomfortably. ”Is it a whole planet full of worm things? I mean, not that I want to judge based on appearance or whatever, but I’m pretty much always going to do that anyway, and—“

”I wasn’t asking.”

”Okay, okay.” Jeremy put his hand to the doorknob and concentrated for a few seconds, then looked back up at Fantha. ”Wait,” he said. ”Does a planet full of worm things have any doors in it?”

Fantha considered this for a second. ”Shit,” she concluded. ”Well, can you at least get us to the next Type I civilization over?”

Outside of the beige mass flickering in and out of the branches of the world-tree, apart from a few isolated pockets of speciesized violence everyone had the feeling that an actor has when the audience has departed. Whatever metaphysical moment of battle-ness had been influencing their decisions over the recent climactic period, the spirit of the thing had gone out of the survivors. People formed small clusters, sat in circles, and started talking—occasionally about how to stop the growth of the tree and usher in a new era of peace and civilization, but mostly just about stuff.

Cascala, in the midst of an enlightening conversation about the nature of destiny with a vapid girl half her age, decided to let some sun in. She dispelled her hurricane, eliminating yet another symbol of impending doom and further lightening the general mood.

Once more, the effect upon the tree was nigh-instantaneous. The yggdrasilus shook off its old dead foliage and began budding anew.

Kath woke up from a quick nap to find herself once more enshrouded in green. She smiled, stood, gestured. The world-tree sprang to life. Infinity lay before her.