THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN]

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Spoilerthis wasn't worth a year-long wait

Timothy angrily sat on the sidewalk across from the inn. An outfit of corporate rent-a-cops had set up what could be generously described as a barricade around the convulsing hallucination that The Traveler's Rest had become. A handful of them loitered around, urging the throngs of people-- tourists, gamblers, a few wealthy elite emerging from their glass spires-- to keep moving. A few tried to slip past, driven by hedonism to experience whatever was inside the phantasm. Most kept moving, the initial sensation already having faded.

His feet petulantly kicked the street, his wooden shoes scuffing against it with his petty display of rebellion. He was powerless. She-- the bird lady, the one with a name Timothy couldn't remember-- was in there, along with everyone else who was trapped, and no one was doing anything to stop it. The apprentice hadn't even tried telling one of the adults. They wouldn't have listened. There wasn't anything he could do-- all he had were a handful of useless cantrips and his stupid wooden shoes. Timothy hated wooden shoes.

The apprentice looked up at Alaster, who vacantly stared at the phantasm-inn. "Why don't you do something," He half-asked, half-pleaded.

Alaster did not respond.

Timothy stomped one foot down, scrunching his face angrily as he stared at the clockwork automaton. He glanced at the barricade again. The outfit of corporate police had relaxed-- the danger had passed, it was just everyday business again. They probably wouldn't even notice if someone snuck in, Timothy absentmindedly thought. Alaster has to protect him, Timothy then thought. If he ran inside, it'd have to follow him-- and it could stop all the nightmares. It'd have to, if it wanted to protect him.

The apprentice nodded to himself as his eight-year old mind put the various pieces together. He wasn't helpless. He could do something. The realization had only barely sunk in before his wooden shoes beat against the tempered-glass avenue of Eta Carina, as Timothy took off running.

A half-second too late, his clockwork guardian noticed him escaping. The ticking cogs and mechanisms of the automaton did not even pause to think as it charged after the child, into the living nightmare he had disappeared into.

---

The vorpal blade was the pinnacle of magical enhancement to bladed weaponry. The magic used in the forging and enchanting of one had taken centuries to perfect and had, after only a handful of the weapons had been made, been deemed too dangerous. Any written records of the methods used were destroyed-- in part because the strong, muscular fighters that wizards loathed could pick up and use the blades. The blade's impossibly-honed edge could cleave the intangible, and it was a weapon that there was no defense to-- no amount of iron or magic or skill or regret could hope to stop its blade.

When Alaster's vorpal blade swung through a cloud of nightmares, the Inn's wraiths did not reform-- the hallucinations-made-real had no defense against its edge. It stormed through the labyrinthine hallways, its blade scything through the hotel's apparitions with every stride forward. The spirit directing its motion was lost in the inn's labyrinth, following the barest hints of Timothy's location.

"Alaster!" Came a voice, echoing down from three separate corridors.

The automaton automatically chose a direction and barreled forward, not paying attention to the subtle changes in the hallway's direction, or that it had twisted against itself and Alaster was now marching along the ceiling. The lesser angel bound to its clockwork machinery was far too constrained to have anything close to intuition, but something within it knew it had chosen the correct way, and nothing else mattered.

"Alaster!" Came the yell again, followed by the clatter of wooden shoes.

A noise somewhere between a foghorn and a church's bell was the clockwork knight's response as it charged. The gear and mechanisms of its legs strained to keep up with the exertion put on them. Even though they were the finest clockwork the artificers of his home plane could produce, that was barely enough to handle the stress of the mass of adamantine and brass now running forward. Alaster only began to slow down as Timothy came into sight-- the boy was tired, bleeding, and had clear scratch-marks across his robes. A pale blue bubble of magic surrounded him. The apprentice weakly held his hands out, projecting the protective ward keeping him alive.

"A-alaster," Timothy faintly said as the knight entered the abjuring sphere. He didn't have time to say more, repeating the incantations and sustaining his spell for another six seconds.

"You Should Not Have Done This." Alaster half-bellowed, half-admonished. The inn was constricting around them, with a myriad of half-formed phantasms circling around, barely outside the protective ward. The spell wouldn't last forever, not when an apprentice mage was maintaining it-- and neither of them could move, not if they wanted to maintain the sole barrier between life and a grisly death. The lesser angel bound within Alaster's clockwork and crystal machinery realized that there were too many nightmares to fight, even for a machine that could never tire. Simple attrition would be enough to wear the knight down.

For something fundamentally incapable of fear, the automaton somehow felt the slightest wavering of its programmed conviction.

"I-I w-wanted you to do something," Timothy whimpered. The protective ward flickered for a split-second before reasserting itself. "You wouldn't listen to me."

All around them, the inn's walls cracked and broke apart, transforming from drywall and plaster into a mass of innumerable slavering mouths, all around the boy and his protector. Impossibly-sharp teeth clattered hungrily, eagerly anticipating their next meal. Feed, feed, they inaudibly whispered, drawing closer and closer.

"You wouldn't listen." The apprentice pleaded for one last, final time as the spell protecting them fizzled and failed and the Traveler's Rest collapsed around them.