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

Off in the corner of the workshop, the clockwerk continued cycling with a tock.

Idle hands being the devil’s plaything, and said devil having earned nothing but coal over the passage of this cruel and interminable year, Klaus liked to incorporate his work into his murders. The clockwerk made this a less ludicrous proposition in the heat of man-to-man combat.

Behold the clockwerk! One of the four fundamental treasures of General Relativity, the motive perpetuity of the clockwerk created a new kind of time, one applied not as a function of gravity but of productivity, of the ticks and tocks and whirrs and worrisome hisses and springs and clangs emanating from its overcomplicated chassis. The clockwerk was one of those convenient little cheats that one day might enable a hopeful Santa to make presents for all the children of the world in only a night. It also had other, less nostalgic-utopic uses: namely, the ability to create weapons in the space of time it might otherwise take to pull a trigger. With a whirl of stickish limbs an infernal blunderbuss was assembled, aimed and fired in the same (tick!) motion.

Arkal reflexively brought his hammer up to deflect the shot. It was a clumsy motion and the smith banged the tool of his trade against a workbench—and a moment later had fashioned a crude shield, which he strapped on his left hand (tock!) and withwhich deflected the bullet before it connected.

Klaus grimaced. He had never seen another artisan access the clockwerk since it had been bequeathed to him by his Amalgam master(s). This was a problem.

“Some workshop,” noted Arkal with the note of grim humor that he’d so often employed of late to mask his childlike amazement. In the time he’d taken to speak, Klaus, who seemed to be growing more insectoid by the moment, had fashioned and unleashed a very strong and purpose-driven wind-up golem with a major’s stripes. Klaus’ toy soldier battalion rallied around their new leader in a deathly phalanx as the golem pushed a pneumatic fist (tick!) in the direction of Arkal’s head. The smith dove into a pile of materials and, in the call-it-a-second-and-a-half of confusion that followed, found that he had contrived and built a rather elegant suit of spiked silver armor. This, at the very least (tock!), ought to protect him from close combat against the werestick.

In the space of another tick (!) he’d set aside a decent workspace for himself and forged an oversized pencil-spear with enough range to safely turn the eraser-end on the serial number branded on the golem’s forehead. The wind-up major, deprived thus of its identity, gave in to conventional physics, wound down, and melodramatically collapsed into its component parts. Its subordinates, desperate for orders, fell to comical infighting, slapping each other across the workshop, wrapping their hands around throats that housed no windpipes.

Klaus had in this time (tock!) already perfected his wind-up dog, and it sank its teeth viciously into the smith’s arm, perforating the silver armor. As Arkal tried to shake the beast off with his hammer, nano-rabies crawled from between its canines and began to worm their way through a labyrinth of chainmail to his exposed skin. Remembering a feature of the armor (he seemed to have made it in the space between thoughts, so these details came to him as though retroactively), he flicked a switch on the chestplate, disengaging the arm and flinging the dog into the corner. Half a dozen lingering nano-rabies spat acid froth onto his bicep.

Arkal, through the pain and terror and thrill of battle, was impressed by the level of detail. A craftsman who could see the small things as only an insect can—and working for the obliteration of non-human life. Madness. Arkal pressed his arm against the rim of his forge, burning his arm enough (he hoped) to disinfect it. The dog attacked again, aiming this time for Arkal’s throat, but couldn’t find the jugular amidst its prey’s tangle of white beard.

Pulled to the floor by the hair, Arkal had little time to be grateful that he still drew breath. He wrestled with the dog for several seconds, and was pinned, both hands gripping the overgrown toy’s neck while its claws dug painfully at his breastplate. He looked around desperately for salvation, seeing only materials out of his reach and Klaus in the corner stalling over blueprints for some sort of hydraulic battlesuit.

Then Arkal looked down. At the juncture of the dog’s hindlegs two steel ball bearings orbited each other in a tiny centrifuge; with a desperate surge of strength he kicked, praying for absolution for what he considered a war crime. The ball bearings clattered against the ground; the dog yelped (inasmuch of a scraping of metal on metal can be construed as a “yelp) and bounded into the corner, neutered.

Having the distinct feeling that something was hulking above him (tick!), the smith rolled and forged a solid if unspectacular sword and shield on his way to a standing position. Klaus’s six-legged hobbypunk mech suit had evidently been completed. The werestick strutted (a little clumsily) and crossed his forearms and midarms in triumph. The toy soldiers once again recognized the presence of a superior and assumed formation behind him, those that were still functioning.

“No, no improving on perfection from one such as you,” Klaus gloated. “Barely an improvement on the base materials you wield. Silver will not save you now.”

Arkal was genuinely unsure whether he was playing for time or was upset at Klaus’ judgment on his work: “And what of your own creations, Klaus? One was defeated by pink rubber and the other by the toe of my boot. I didn’t even make these boots. The cobbler, as I recall, was a drunk and a—”

“Bah! Your qualms as to durability are quite beside the point. In the world to come there will be no dissidents such as you to unmake what I have made. With only a little oil and occasional maintenance and yes love! With love my beautiful things shall outlive your nasty weapons of death!”

Arkal shrugged, then winced, clutching his burned arm. “You truly think the humans in your ‘world to come’ will love your creations any more than they would love you? Any more than they would love the insect inside you? You don’t know humans, Klaus.”

“I know humans better than to deny their right to rule this universe! Everything I do, I do for humanity!”

“Think of the children, Klaus. Curious, reckless children.”

The mech advanced another step. “All for the children! Of course! You wouldn’t see, no, of course not. You would give your children only weapons, and raise an army of soldiers. I would give them toys, and raise a generation of young craftsmen, little Klauses. Curious children, yes, good children.” From the head of the mech there came a satisfied clicking noise that made Arkal shudder.

Still the smith pressed the point. “Those children will pull their toys apart just to see how they work—only to find then that they don’t work. What do you think they’ll do then, Klaus? Get their fathers to fix it for them?”

“Yes!” The mech leaned forward excitedly, skittering on four of its legs. “What a magical moment! Father and son bonding over the inner workings of a miracle! From man to material and back again! Reveling in my art!”

Arkal shook his head. “You don’t understand humans at all,” he repeated. “The child will cry. And then his father will throw the toy out and get a new one. From the…” the word sprang anachronistically into his head—something that had been explained to him in New Battleopolis? “From the factory.”

Klaus shuddered. Arkal took a quick step back as the mech took on a hexapedal formation, its gears grinding with an eerie semblance of mechanical emotion. “No,” he insisted. “More lies from you, weaponsmith. Lies lies lies. The knives you make with your tongue cannot pierce my carapa—my skin, ironmonger. There is no f-f-f-f-f-f-ffffffffucktory that can replicate my art. Now. Now now now now now now.” The stick paused, as though it had forgotten its original purpose. Then it turned back to Arkal. “Now you die!”

Klaus lunged.

And an elephant-sized chunk of the moon fell on his battle suit and crushed it utterly.

The dog whimpered metallically from the corner. Distantly there was a chorus of moos. A toy soldier knelt by the broken Klausmech and seemed to lead the squadron in a silent prayer.

Arkal coughed up a lungful of dust and made himself a pair of goggles and a mask all while holding his breath (tock!). He examined the battle suit. Klaus appeared to be gone… but wait. He examined the rock, unsure why he was so certain it was actually the moon. He had never touched moonrock before… Whatever it was, Arkal hammered off a workable chunk of it to carry with him. A new material was always a gift from heaven, some more literally than most.

A stick insect, no longer than four inches from end to end, skittered from the wreckage of the battle suit into a pile of scrap. Arkal stumbled after it, hoping maybe to catch Klaus in a jar, but it outraced him. Close proximity to this much moon had swept away the rest of his humanity, which, hopefully, would eliminate the threat he represented, at least for the time being.

“Moo”

Five or six cows peeked their heads down into the hole through which the moonrock had made its dramatic entrance. A breeze drifted in. If Arkal looked up, he could see straight through to this place’s sky, and, indeed, the sky was broken, the moon shattered, the stars trembling and winking out.

There’s something about looking at the sky, broken or no, that gives one an innate sense of unity with whosoever else might be looking at the sky at the same moment, it being, after all, the same sky. Arkal’s recent travails through a great multiplicity of worlds had dimmed, for him, the universality of “sky,” but at the very least this moment allowed his thoughts to turn to Jen and Xadrez, who no doubt were watching this same phenomenon unfold in the midst of whatever adventures had befallen them.

And then Kracht showed up. ”…Arkal?”

The smith groaned. “Aye, Kracht, it’s me.”

”I’m never going to understand what’s going on here, am I?”

The slightly cracked and befuddled tenor of Kracht’s voice—far from the smug drone of the Kracht that had died in the leviathan’s heart—provided some clues to the desired state of understanding. If his hunch was right, Kracht would have plenty of time to figure it out for himself. So instead he simply said: “Let’s start with survival. Leave the understanding to the historians.”

”Fair enough.” Kracht left into the hole, skitted across the smoldering moonchunk and landed gracefully by Arkal’s side. He indicated the toy soldiers. ”Are they with you?”

”Haven’t the slightest. They were trying to kill me a moment ago… one second.” (Tick!) Arkal hefted a makeshift battle standard in the air. “Men!” he called to the toy soldiers, swallowing the questionmark at the end of that question. “I have proven myself the superior craftsman and am now your master!” Dubious statements both, but the wind-up men were as suggestible as their wide ball-bearing eyes appeared, and they saluted in uncertain semi-unison. Arkal nodded in return, then turned to Kracht, who was rocking on his heels nervously. “You brought trouble with you, didn’t you?” he asked in a hushed voice. Tock.

Kracht nodded. “Silver Shards,” he confessed, whispering as though worried that the toy soldiers might hear. Tick. “Amalgam shock troops. I gave them the slip but they can trace my radiation signature.” Tock.

“How long until they’re upon us?” Tick, tock.

”More than a minute, less than an hou—” Tick, ”Do you hear that?” Tock.

Tick tock tick tock.

Arkal turned his eyes to the pile of scrap into which the diminutive Klaus had disappeared. From within there was a buzzing—no, not a buzzing. A thousand tiny sounds that aggregated into a sort of buzz in tune with the ticking. The sounds of wrenches, saws, welding torches. Somewhere deep within he saw sparks and shards of metal. Ticktockticktock. The clockwerk groaned, ejected a spring, and continued ticktocking unimpeded.

There was work underway. Arkal took a nervous step back.

* * * * *

If anyone was to be blamed for all this, it was almost certainly Leonardo da Vinci.

Surely a young Hand of Silver, pursuing his own stunted brand of enlightenment via Google Image searches and Kracht.com articles, would have stumbled across the Vitruvian Man at some point. Of what infantile corpus of art that the fledgling human race had yet produced at that point in its preHosstory, this one would have been sure to appeal to the future panmonarch’s sensibilities—one that placed the human form (the European male human form, to split hairs) on a pedestal of aesthetics, of function, of geometry itself. He would see Man elevated to the center of the cosmos, not by dint of its achievements past or future, but intrinsically, simply by being Man. And so was born a God in Man’s image.

This was the sort of thing Jen, as Queen, had spent a rather long time trying to prevent, and largely failed. On her more bitter days, she called it “stoner magic”—the insistence on a just-so cosmic order, that there was one key image or framework that explained everything—human bodies, ovoids, city planning, chessboards, Tarot decks, trees of life, weaves of fate (just like our DNA! Can’t you see?), hexaflexagons, the colors green and purple, and accursed above all, numerology. In the wrong or even the right hands the most reductive and asinine magical principles could be the most dangerous. Several of them were flying around Hector’s Place wreaking havoc at the very moment when Jennifer Tull, in the tradition of many more angelic than she, fell to [earth].

She hit one of the few clearings not yet paved over by the march of the Silver City. The ground welcomed her as tenderly as it could, which is to say, she made a crater instead of a puddle. Cedric, several seconds behind, hit his head on hard rock, denting his helm. The perfect knight’s fermented, slightly caustic blood dribbled down his forehead and began to smell.

Jen stood erect-ish and coughed. Nothing broken, except the moon, and also everything. Her battledress was caked in mosaic layers of dirt and moonsoil and her hair weighed thirty pounds. Cedric attempted a gurgling groan. “Just a minute,” called Jen, stamping her foot to summon a nearby lake on her side. At the bottom of the lake something was shimmering, or singing, or something. “Thank you,” she wheezed at the lake, and dove. In the water her dress ejected a cloud of grey and brown and green, like a feeding frenzy for Vegan sharks. Thirty seconds later, she emerged refreshed and with the Ovoid sword in hand.

Cedric whispered, wetly, what Jen might have guessed to be obscenities. She smirked and knelt beside him. “I beat you,” she told him, and then, more certainly, “I beat you.” Cedric spat out a tooth. “With only moderate cheating.” She was still just a little afraid to get too close. All his power was still there, only chaotic and dispersed, like radiation after an nuclear meltdown. Her work wasn’t done yet.

Jen raised the Ovoid sword above Cedric’s heart.

Not yet

”Shit.” Jen tried not to turn around, feeling it would be more dignified to affect complete nonchalance, but she looked anyway, and was glad she did. Xadrez had apparently been through some changes. Adorning the tactician’s spirit body was an intricate vestment of golden threads, draping over his chessboard, hanging upon his ethereal shoulders, curling around his arms and tying off at the end of each of his long fingers. With every calculating and deeply suspicious flicker of his digits, the entire tapestry fluttered and shone brilliantly in the unmoonlight.

Not the welcome I was hoping for

But your disposition doesn’t matter to me so long as you remain under the thumb of your life debt

Which you’ll be happy to note I’m providing you an opportunity to repay

Jen pouted. “Come on, Xadrez. All I want right now is to kill this guy. It’ll only take a second.”

Xadrez wagged a finger.

And it’s always about what you want, isn’t it “your highness”

—the sarcasm sublimated but with just a twinge of psychic glee—

Well not anymore

Funny how it took a trip to your own territory or a version of it for me to finally feel more important than you

All through this battle the rest of us could never really keep up with the aura of cosmic destiny you wear like so much cheap perfume but now look

The spirit twitched a finger, revealing a strand of golden thread that from certain angles hinted at a pallid purple or an unhealthy green.

A cosmic destiny isn’t so big a thing really

You’re going to help me fix some

Jen sheathed the sword, trying in doing so to create the impression of a slamming door. She felt bratty and adolescent, which was a comfortable return to normalcy after so much wallowing in uncomfortable memories. “I guess we are.” Cedric lifted one arm up with a sound like a jet engine failing and Jen stomped on his knuckles. His godbeard was reduced to cinders with flecks of grey ash, kicking up only the occasional spark. “So what’s the move?”

While you were off presumably blowing up the moon I was asking the right questions and so came to understand the exact nature of the threat we face this round

I was shown that the metatimestream you and I call home is only shakily the prime timeline

And that only through a good deal of careful scaffolding on the part of assorted Grandmasteresques and um

Time DJs

The chain of extracausality that transitions us from this ur-timeline to the one requisite to our existence is bookended by two events

The second of which we have already set into motion

This was the death of Kracht at the hands of your successor

Which while I’m sure you’re still bearing a grudge about that whole sequence of events

Understand had Kracht lived the game would once more have been reset and you might have redshifted into

I don’t know

Jean Yinnaboddul, Yellow-Queen of Middle-Sun or something awful like that

And both of us would have been slaughtered by the rock for all eternities until causality itself became conscious of its utter meaninglessness and destroyed itself

”Don’t expect me to give you any medals,” retorted Jen. “You didn’t know any of this when you let Kracht die. And there could have been other ways.”

Again

I cannot stress enough how irrelevant your feelings are to this endeavor

That was the second event from Kracht’s perspective and the first from ours

The other event is the inception of the time-loop that allows this ghastly anthrophilic timeline to be retired

It’s right here

Xadrez twitched three fingers. One of the strands, tinted slightly read, was badly frayed, and stretched an inch farther at the chessmaster’s movement.

The final three contestants of the first last battle there ever was

Kracht’s been staying away from Emma because he almost killed her by radiation exposure a couple rounds back

Emma Broderburg

Being a lot like you in certain ways but less self-serving

Is seeking Kracht out

Beginning to understand that this isn’t going to end without the sacrifice of her cutesy messianic little life

Cedric is the big bad who’s going to precipitate the desperate turn of events that leads to a dying Emma briefly becoming the most powerful being in the multiverse

And being too sentimental or too addled to simply wipe away the Amalgam like a smudge on the windshield and build a utopia on its corpse

She’s going to pull the last desperate recourse of stupid nostalgic superheroines

Sending Kracht back in time “to fix everything”

In doing so turning each successive alternate timeline into a bomb that detonates at the moment corresponding to that of her death and leaving only Kracht

Who presses on for eternities out of an idiotic will to live out his horrid repetitive life

And an egocentric assumption that his death would lead to another Ovoid ascendancy and xenocide

You with me so far?

Jen nodded. “I got it. So if I kill Cedric—“

Then Kracht and Emma proceed to Final Round

An utterly unpredictable event that has never occurred in any timeline and cannot be properly fated

Though a direct confrontation between an ascendant Emma Broderburg and the Amalgam on its own terms would be not so much unpredictable as unfathomable

Jen sighed. “So. Say we get Kracht sent back in time like he’s supposed to and ensure that our Ovoid-free timeline happens. That clears my life-debt. And then what? We’re still stuck here.”

Xadrez shook his head slowly. I should hope not

When I say the timeline becomes a bomb I was not being facetious

The time travel event doesn’t merely transubstantiate this ‘round’ into a causally irrelevant, nonprime timeline

It creates an end to time

If we remain in this round as the precipitate event occurs, we will cease to experience time

Cutting our own battle short around and curtailing our vengeance against the Observer and his ilk

Jen gripped the hilt of the Ovoid-sword. “…We’d be saving the multiverse, though,” she said, after some deliberation.

Not good enough

And certainly no grounds to absolve your debt to me

Only I have the knowledge and only you have the power to ensure this happens

And the two of us just may have a chance of defeating the Observer in the final round

As an agent of the Fates I can assure you we all have our purposes to serve in this

Maxwell delivered Sikarius to Fanthalion the consequences of which meeting are yet to become entirely clear

Kracht as mentioned earlier enabled our timeline to exist

Through the forging of your sword both the Ovoid and Arkal served their purpose

Jen threw the sword to the ground. “I can’t do it and I won’t. Saving Cedric is one thing.”

What did I tell you about your personal feelings

Maybe if you hadn’t meddled around with contractual magic through your misspent youth you might allow yourself enough agency to stubbornly ruin things for the rest of us

But your life is bond, Jen

Three tasks I require of you

Save Cedric

Reunite Kracht and Emma

And kill Arkal of the Silver Anvil before the world ends

And that done we can talk about our feelings if you want