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

Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.

---

A fire was spreading.

The beavers were the front lines of containment, working in shifts to build a dam that would divert a couple of rivers directly into the fire. This effort was held up by protests from the rivers themselves, who pointed out that they would have diverted themselves if anyone had only asked nicely but now that they didn’t have a say in it weren’t sure that they were overly keen to be thrust face-first into a probably-magical inferno of death. After flowing upstream for a bit, the rivers were told off by their sources, forced to swallow their pride, and began flooding the afflicted area.

Sir Cedric stood amidst the flame, watching it consume monsters by the thousand. Across three battles, he had developed a very, very comprehensive definition of the term “monster.” The family of chipmunks stuffing as much food into their cheeks as possible before abandoning their home to the fire were monsters. The butterfly, barely intelligent enough to register that a hole had been burnt in her wings, was a monster. The clovers that all had four leaves until the moment you picked one, at which point they all turned into poison ivy, were just weird, and obviously monstrous. Admittedly, they were not very challenging monsters, but then again, what was, nowadays? Cedric had killed everything worth killing already, including the God he’d used to fight for and more Grandmasters than he could name. He could only name two Grandmasters, but that was still pretty impressive.

Cedric’s beard whispered to him the secrets of the flame. The fire was in pain, retreating under an assault from two rivers, the first of which would be bearing down on his location in a matter of moments. The knight smiled. He hadn’t expected these monsters to defend themselves so effectively or so quickly. Well, they clearly had magic and knew how to use it. So did he.

The river came upon him like a two-story-high wave, all at once. It was angry. The knight had been around the block enough times to know the difference between an indifferent force of nature thoughtlessly mowing down everything in its path, and an angry force of nature mowing down everything in its path with purpose. The river was the second kind, and he was the first.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unstoppable force with a bigger sword?

Miles upstream, fish were boiled alive. The beavers’ newly-constructed dams caught fire from contact with the water alone. The riverbanks defaulted on their debts and started a financial crisis affecting businesses far inland. Jennifer Tull, rushing toward the fire through the treetops, paused to see the horizon blocked off by a wall of steam.

Cedric stood panting—dry as a bone—and turned around to face the second river.

From atop his zebra, Hector held one hand palm-up and blinked. In his palm was now a tiny, beautiful yellow canary. The canary took one whiff of the smoke rising from the forest and died. ”Damn,” grunted the king, tossing the dead bird onto the ground and hoping there would be time enough for it to decompose and live a second life as soil.

Cedric’s victory against the second river was not so graceful. Coughing and sputtering and knee-deep in mud, he was clean-shaven for a terrifying minute before a five o’ clock spark began to spread across his chin. His forest fire dimmed a bit in the humidity, but remained flickering among the canopies of the trees.

A shadow passed in front of the flames.

A human girl maybe a year younger than Hector, dressed in a hospital gown of all things, jumped down from the canopy to face the firestarter. She looked vaguely familiar--pretty in a boring sort of way--but the king’s eyes were drawn to her sword. The flickering beige of the sword looked very familiar.

A purple-clad warrior maybe a year older than Jen rode in on a purple-and-black Pegasus and interposed himself between herself and the arsonist. He was handsome in a forgettable sort of way. He was unarmed.

Cedric admired his reflection in the water. He was gorgeous. He turned towards the newcomers. “You kids come to fight me? Why would you want to do that? You’ve seen what I can do.”

”Have I? When was that?" asked Jen. The ex-queen then looked down at the water pooling around her feet. "Oh, the river thing. That's what you can do?"

Cedric smiled. "Aye, 'twas I who turned back--"

"Well, then, you're right. Why the fuck would I want to fight you, Sir Cedric? I have kind of a code against killing people who can't defend themselves."

Cedric advanced a step. "I used to think that way," he said. "Then for a while I just didn't kill people who got the hell out of my way. Nowadays I don't--"

”That’s enough out of both of you!” interrupted Hector. “I’m king in this Place and I don’t allow humans here. Go back where you came from or die. Those are your only options.”

Jen rolled her eyes and drew her sword. ”Oh, great, another anti-human shitbird,” she spat. “Like I didn't get enough of that last round.”

”That is no way to address royalty when you're trespassing in his kingdom, bitch!”

”D’you just say ‘round?’”

”Kid,” sneered Jen. “How about we kill this pyromaniac first, and then go back to my place and have a serious talk about lines of succession. Does the name 'Jen the First' ring a bell?”

Hector’s face softened with recognition. “Jen the First,” he repeated. “Huh. The hell did you get back from the dead?”

”Ha! Which time?”

Cedric’s megaphone blared to life. ”THIS CONVERSATION IS BORING!” he shouted. ”EITHER FUCKING FIGHT ME OR JUMP INTO THE FIRE AND DIE QUIETLY!”

The two monarchs turned. Cedric’s Silver Sword was strapped behind his back. In one hand he held the megaphone, in the other a silver cube. Etched on the cube was what appeared to be a crude silhouette of a turkey.

Jen shrugged. “Since I haven’t had to kill a magic-powered warlord asshole in fifteen fucking minutes. Alright, Captain Redbeard, since you’re clearly so fucking anxious, you can show us what the fucking cube thing does.”

Cedric had no time to decipher the girl’s sarcasm. He smiled, showing off his lovely new silver teeth, and threw the cube into the mud.

Where there had been a forest half an hour before, a four-story tenement building sprouted up under the three warriors’ feet. It was a soulless, purely functional entity of glass, metal, and concrete. From below them came the buzz of thousands of fluorescent lights flickering on at once.

Cedric laughed and drew his sword. “Nice place for a duel, isn't it?"

The building was still growing. Down on the ground, a web of sidewalks were beginning to spread, choking the roots of those trees that had survived the fire. A sewer grate appeared and began to suck in the riverwater. The Silver City began to overtake the Place, inch by inch.

Jen raised the beige blade and charged. Hector took a step back and blinked.

Originally posted on MSPA by Dragon Fogel.

---

The dungeon was not what Arkal had been expecting. For one thing, he had been expecting a dungeon.

What he found, when the mothmen let him go, was a large, purple room with no furniture at all. A dozen or so creatures sat in a half-circle; in the center of the implied circle was a man in blue armor who appeared to have a large golden key for a head.

"Jailer, the King wants this one for questioning," one of the mothmen said to the key-headed man. "Try to keep him sane enough to answer."

"Man is a fragile creature," he replied.

"Yeah, whatever. His Majesty should be back in an hour or so, after that you can do whatever with him." The mothman and his partner left, clearly not interested in staying any longer than he needed to.

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste!" the jailer called after them.

For five minutes, Arkal could do nothing but stare at the proverb-spouting stranger. Finally, he decided not to bother waiting around, and stood up. There was no cell here, he might as welll just leave.

He took three steps before he hit something he couldn't see or feel.

"We are all trapped in prisons of our own making," the key-headed man said calmly.

Arkal tried to pound on the invisible wall, but this was difficult because the wall didn't seem to actually exist - he just stopped when he hit a certain point. Finally, he gave in and simply asked.

"What the hell is this all about? Why can't I leave?"

"No man can escape himself," the Jailer replied. He sipped on a cup of tea; Arkal was sure it hadn't been there two seconds ago.

A large snail in the next "cell" turned to Arkal and chuckled.

"It's no use tryin' to get any real words out of him," the snail said. "I've been at it longer than anyone. He never says a thing."

Suddenly, the snail's eyestalks widened.

"Hang on a second! You're a Human! A real, bonafide, honest-to-Hoss Human! How did you get in here?"

Arkal stared back at him.

"I'm in a battle," he said. No other explanation seemed to fit.

The snail squealed with delight.

"A battle, you say? It's arrived here at last? Ooh, that means it's time! The end is coming! I can hardly wait!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Don't tell me you don't know! About the Amalgam's glorious plan to wipe out the last of us inferior species and make Humanity reign supreme! The battle's how it gets in and finally destroys the filthy nonhumans in the Place and puts an end to its greatest foe!"

"Silence is golden," the Jailer interjected.

"Shaddup yer ownself!" the snail yelled back at him. "Cut me some slack here, it's not every day ya get to meet one of yer gods. Place, it's rare enough that you see that devil Hector."

Arkal had been called by many titles in his lifetime, but "god" was a new one. It wasn't one he was comfortable with.

"Shame Jailer here's driven the rest of the boys mad," the snail continued. "They're in no shape to hear the good word - that our miserable nonhuman existence is about to come to an end. We just need the Champion of Silver to win this battle." He suddenly took notice of Arkal's anvil. "Well, wouldja look at that! Yer carryin' a fine hunk of it on your back there. Well, what are you waitin' for? Use it already!"

Confused, Arkal set it down and took out his hammer. Then he scratched his head.

"So what am I supposed to forge with?" he asked. "I can't exactly move very far, and I can't even see a single thing in this room besides the walls."

"What kind of Champion are ya? The silver's supposed to transform this cruel, wicked, inhuman world to a paradise of Humanity, wipin' the filth like us out in the process. It ain't suppose to just sit there while you hammer on it!"

Arkal grunted.

"Have you never seen an anvil before?"

"What the Place is wrong with you? Have you forgotten your duty in the name of Hoss?" A dawning expression suddenly crossed the snail's face. "Oh. That's gotta be it. Some other contestant messed with yer mind!"

Arkal hadn't fully grasped what his fellow captive was saying, but he knew an opportunity when he saw it.

"Oh no," he said unenthusiastically. "I guess I'd better get out of here and stop them, then. And then go and dominate everything for humanity."

"Yeah! You go, oh Human! I may not have a damn clue how to break out of a prison that doesn't exist, but that's what makes me inferior! But a perfect Human like you, a Champion of Silver... why, a weakling like the Jailer can't possibly hold you!"

"It is rude to talk behind someone's back right to their face," the Jailer said suddenly.

"Consider yourself lucky, Keyface!" the snail fired back. "You'll have your inferior nonhuman existence wiped out well before the rest of us!"

Arkal ignored them and looked down at his anvil. Then he sat down, and reached for the wall that wasn't there.

The world's greatest blacksmith smiled. He wasn't entirely out of materials.

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

The Fates were nothing like Xadrez' Fates at all. He couldn't be sure why that offended him, as a perfect parallel would've just irked him further. And lo, he hovered wordlessly scowling in the corner like some sleek-chic-meets-spectre-tech coffee table, shoved from centre by the livelier engagements in life.

His Fates were similar to him; they were souls uplifted from the shoal by a divine smile cast upon them. His were birdlike, if they were like anything better-defined than the incorporeal celestial haze, formless wings hefting talons which seized and tugged eddies from Scout's Cloak. It was said they were the audience to those who died while Scout watched over the wars and plagues to end all disasters, the kind that came with the tidal frequencies of civilisation. They had a reputation for misfortune, or rather for the universe coming knocking on your door to collect whatever fortune had distanced you from the battlefield in the first place. Soldiers called them cowards' deaths, but, come disease or hubris or a sword through your vitals, soldiers and cowards alike joined the fold. The great whirling shell betwixt nothingness and the tiny, all-encompassing world, that was everyone's end.

It had been easier, Xadrez reflected, when the only Fates were his own. Well, no, not his. Scout's. His Fates, the ones that should've answered to him when the gods disappeared (because he had His knife and he was Her lieutenant), they were just scared and confused as he was - but with neither knife nor office were free to screech and panic and bedraggle Her gutted Cloak even worse.

It rained souls that day. The Monochrome slunk out of her catacombs, and feasted.

These Fates had just enough similarities to sting - more snakelike than birdlike, sure, but sisterly. They stared at him in the same unison with that same, shared, pre-emptively resentful expression before he opened his mouth. He settled for a nod, and they returned to their gossipping like he wasn't even there. Their wall-lent chattering was in no language Xadrez could understand, which struck him as odd after having travelled so far.

---

It is said, in the Place: if the gods had a house, the reason nobody's been invited is because it's too untidy for polite company. The saying continues that if you were to stand on the doorstep of the house of the gods and knock, nobody would answer. If you were especially curious, you could stand on the tips of your toes and peer into the immaculately polished fisheye lens. The gods, all distorted and reproachful, would stare right back. All of them, even Canis Days' half-lidded hangdog gaze right at the back of the crowd. One might tell you that your staring was rather rude, and you'd concede they'd made a fair point and go back to where you came from.

The gods didn't exactly have a house, and they didn't exactly have a fisheye lens through which they could appraise the world either. They did almost definitely had a big, round, table, though, and it hummed with the magic of the Middle-Gem and had a great grey dog slouched across a good two thirds of of it.

Canis Days was the only god left at the table, which for most intents and purposes meant he was the only god currently left. The thought would've pleased him, if he hadn't done absolutely nothing so things conspired that way. (Having said that, he had done absolutely nothing, which for a god of atrophy was a satisfying little victory in itself.) He basked in the Middle-Gem's apathetic, avoidant glow. Like the other gods, he found there was little else you could do when its moods swung that way. Unlike the other gods, Days was quite content doing little else.

Days' fur was less like a dog's, more the unkempt scraggle-gray of a man lost in the wilderness. The Staglander heard a ringing, and raised a paw to watch the Librarian, who knocked with methodical impatience at the heartwood plinth. It was the only piece of echoak trim in the whole building, and he'd grown to prefer it that way. Echoak ents, despite their habit for repeating things in their ponderous tree-voices, were prized for the resonant properties of their wood. They travelled the Place as they wished, rewarding hospitality with a branch that could connect you back to the trunk. The signal was better in older trees, and from branches gifted during the ent's youth. The best signal, of course, came from the heartwood; after the tree had set roots and stopped thinking in the way you or I think.

The ent whose heartwood the Librarian rapped upon had settled in the Grove of Knowledge. Its polished stump was cut flush to the ground, and the central rings glowed like something festered away in there. Moses had just gotten off the conch with His Majesty, and couldn't think the Librarian contacting now of all times would improve matters.

"Mr Smith," he gently remonstrated, "you should know this is not a good time."

"I know." The Librarian did, and he still sounded apologetic. You don't bother a tortoise like Moses even at the best of times, but events had conspired and here he was.
"It's the Once-General."

The fact the Librarian had to call him to relay this was odder than the event itself. "Which one?"

"Kath's chessmaster."

Oh.

Moses was silent for a time. "I trust you're certain on this."

"I know my history, of course it can't be him-"

"But it's him?"

"Y-Yes."

The tortoise adjusted his spectacles - somehow - in a way as to attract a wandering bee's attention. It saluted a little too smartly at Moses' request, nectaries sloshing with beadlike droplets. One fell in Moses' eye, to much apologetic thrumming and the tortoise's assurances that no, this was quite all right, the bee had been a tremendous help, and would he please direct a hummingbird to the flower he'd just harvested, and have said hummingbird deliver it posthaste to the Library.

"Are you still there, Librarian? Tell me what the Once-General wants."

"I, uh-" there was a scuffling on the line, characteristic of an Echoak respondent's lifting their hands from the link. There was a pause just long enough to mutter "fuck", then a second round of scuffling. "I'm not entirely sure. I'm pretty sure he out-logicked me into agreeing he's a god, but I think he's lost. He sounds lost. Something about finding his pantheon?"

There was some sort of commotion at the gates to the Grove. Not that the Grove actually had any walls around it, but it was one of those sort of places that still somehow only had the one front entrance.

"Right. Assistance in that regard is on its way. Now, if there's nothing else-"

There is

---

Days leapt from the table with a shriek, as though it had glowed blue-hot. The noise startled a pack of other gods, who despite not being all that here mere seconds ago were feeling belligerent, exasperated, alarmed, and self-satisfied all at once. It was all spontaneous and disorienting and everyOne waltzed or stomped or skulked their way around the table like they'd all just woken from a thousand-year nap.

All this activity was too much for Canis Days, whose last act as de facto ruler of the pantheon was to flee over the Whichwerenot Hills, and never be seen again.

---

Meanwhile, back in the Place, a very well-followed phone call was still underway. One of the Fates had emerged from the sitting room, and chirruped with the sorrow of the disaffected - for Xadrez had killed the Librarian. Important as he might've been in the cosmic order, him and his fragile human skull were no match for a ghost with little sanctity for social orders.

(And a paperweight. Xadrez had killed the Librarian with a paperweight, plucked straight from the dead man's mantelpiece.)

Moses

is it

The tortoise, despite himself, suppressed a shudder. That voice had stripped the Place of its able-bodied folk, and sent them all marching off to fight in some war of its own implacable championing. Xadrez could feel all of the eyes in the world worth transfixing upon him. It was almost intoxicating, like hanging suspended delirious in a great sparkling web of everything interconnected with the tactician at its heart.

A billion, trillion eyes could judge him. And under their judgement, he could do no wrong save be a legend.

Tell me

what was the answer I could not be given

Moses hung up, partly because he had no wish to negotiate with an insurgent usurper who should've been dead, but more because they'd found "the rock".

Ring ring ring, unanswered, went the rings on the echoak stump.

Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.

---

Five smokestacks of polished aluminum burst through the bedrock like a hand coming out of a grave. They swallowed up the sandy lower layers of the soil and engulfed the looser topsoil, devouring the grass and the purple-tinted dew that rested on the grass. The Silver City burst into the sunlight of the Place, and made no attempt to be gentle.

A blast of heat from nowhere fused the soil into a rocky foundation. Unneeded materials—plant matter, nutrients, insects, woodland creatures, traces of the Place’s inherent magic—were discarded, fed to the smokestacks, and ejected as a wispy, silver fume. An overcurious bird got a lungful of the smoke and took a dive; by the time she hit the ground, there was a rooftop in the way.

It began to rain. The clouds put their best effort into beating back the smoke, to little avail; when that failed, they threw their largest hailstones against the building rising up against them, resulting in nothing but a bit of ambient noise and a minor inconvenience for the three figures dueling on the rooftops. The building sprouted gutters, transporting the hailstones link an unholy Plinko machine to a gleaming new storm drain.

Dejected, the clouds allowed the wind to shuffle them along to safer regions, and the sun shone through the windows of the burgeoning factory. With a faintly purple tint it illuminated the complicated and mysterious machines assembling themselves on the factory floor. The industrial process sprang to life with a grand hum. Strange energies unseen in the history of the Place began to broadcast: wireless Internet, radio waves, Gamma decay. The latent magic clinging to the air attempted to incorporate these new phenomena and was instead itself replaced by something else.

Some unholy energy source began turning the pistons on the great machines. Silvery steam hissed out of vents as loosely-defined blocks of superheated metal were carried by conveyer belt from one apparatus to another. A giant gear, appearing more decorative than utilitarian, began to spin counterclockwise, then, as though changing its mind, stopped and spun clockwise for a bit.

Within the bowels of the building his-n-hers bathrooms were hastily assembled, linking up to a spidery sewer network that dug its way through the earth like a giant worm; non-organic paper substitutes fluttered around a burgeoning office before arranging themselves on a metal desk; a calendar, adorned with images of indistinct beige feminine figures in silver lingerie, flicked over to the current date. Outside on the curb, a sign burst forth from the Earth, proudly declaring INFINITY days since our last workplace injury.

The conveyer belts looped around in an endless circle, warping the molten metal into different configurations, producing nothing. The factory itself, and its flagrant mockery of what had minutes before been a tranquil meadow, was output enough.

Something rotated into being, something flesh-toned and loosely ovoid. An arm burst out of it, wiggling its fingers experimentally, then a leg. It grew a thin brown mustache, then almost everything about it that wasn’t a human melted away. The fragment coughed up about a tablespoon of something pink, then pulled a jumpsuit out of four-space and stepped into it carefully. On the breast pocket of the jumpsuit was the label “4-Man.”

The 4-Man manually pulled one of its heavy, goopy eyelids back up into its forehead and revealed a malformed eye, which without an iris could only properly focus on things about two meters away. “Demet,” it mumbled. It peered through the window as though to make sure that the sun wasn’t shining, and squeezed its eyeball with its fingers in a rough approximation of squinting.

Something clicked in the 4-Man’s developing brain telling it to run, but didn’t quite make it to its legs. When the giant shimmering rainbow-colored snake first smashed its head against the window, it looked for a moment like the glass was going to hold. The reinforced pane rippled against the impact out to the edges, and then abruptly shattered. A shard of glass perforated the 4-Man’s neck, and it noticed to its surprise that it was full of blood before being crushed out of existence by several hundred pounds of snake skull.

Outside, the numbers on the sign fluttered. “It has been ZERO days since our last workplace injury, it corrected.

Jen, perched on the poor unconscious monster’s neck, caught her breath. She threw her head forward and hurriedly combed through her hair with her fingers, dislodging a few bits of broken glass, a scale or two, and a terrified moth. Her sword clattered to the floor. She recalled having been better at this at some point.

Outside, she could hear the battle between Sir Cedric and King Hector raging outside. Hector, she judged, would be able to hold him off for a bit with his weird pulling-animals-out-of-the-air magic-but-not-magic-magic powers. Cedric was strong, though. The kind of strong you can’t count on to tire out or make a mistake. She would need to get proactive.

As though mocking her plans, the Silver City gave the ex-monarch something to react to. Some half-dozen shambling Amalgam-fragments began to shimmer into existence around the factory floor, briefly contorting in unearthly many-limbed forms before settling on standard-issue three-dimensional bipedalism. They hung together as though their creators had designed their skin to be one-size-fits-all. They adorned themselves in work boots, baggy pants and wifebeaters, welding masks, goggles and industrial-strength gloves. Then they turned to Jen.

“4-Man gone,” lamented one worker.

“Oonion employss only,” another barked at Jen.

“Nun-regallation equippent!” shrieked another, indicating the snake. “Safety hazzid!”

A fragment pushed through the crowd and brandished a hot poker at Jen. “Oonion ordinnits nummur two states: kill! Dustroy!”

“You know,” sneered Jen, retrieving the Ovoid-sword, “Last time I killed all you people you were a lot more articulate.”

Her sword went through the worker’s neck but didn’t come out the other side. Through it, Jen could feel a strange pulse, like the opposite of an absence, the stuff of the Amalgam itself. Even compared to the Ovoid she had known, there was something wrong about this entity. She pulled the sword out. The fragments were closing in all around her.

During her reign, Jen had gotten herself in a lot of fights with what she might tactlessly describe as “minions.” These fights fell into two camps. There were fights against minions who genuinely believed they could kill her and reap some sort of benefits from this victory, and then there were fights like this.

* * * * *

A swarm of anti-fireflies flew out of a vent, absorbing the light in the alleyway and giving Hector some time to escape. This was not going well. Where had Jen the First gone? His Progenitor powers weren’t doing him much good without a decent swordfighter to back him up, especially in the Silver City, where he was having a tough time triggering plant growth. He had a strain of crabgrass doing its level best to disrupt the pavement, his strongest ivy was working on bringing down some of the less stable buildings and a cloud of pollen was valiantly attempting to disrupt communications within the City, but he was barely even slowing its growth, let alone creating conditions that would give him the advantage. This place had become stifling for all life except humanity, and Hector didn’t make humans. It was a rule of his—he could make humans, but couldn’t fathom a situation in which the world would be improved by the addition of another human.

Taking to the street, Hector climbed onto the back of a charging hippopotamus, then grabbed on to the tail of a sky-manta and took to the air. The sky-manta dropped the monarch off on a low rooftop and perched chirping on a ledge, keeping watch. Hector closed his eyes and tried to think. “Huginn, Muninn,” he muttered, speaking the names aloud to give them power. Obediently the two symbolically-charged ravens appeared on his shoulder and began to whisper to him.

”This is not a fight you can win alone, my King,” counseled Huginn.

”Look to the former Queen,” agreed Muninn. ”If necessary, look to the other.”

“Find her,” commanded Hector to Muninn. The raven of memory cawed affectionately and flew high above the city.

Hector opened his eyes. “What happened?” he asked Huginn.

”Ill tidings, King,” warned the other crow. ”Memory will return to you as soon as it is able with the Queen you asked for.”

“I’m getting married?” asked Hector.

”You must think, my liege. Sir Cedric will seek the Middle-Gem to initiate a paradigm-shift. Place a call in to your Librarian.”

There was a conch shell in Hector’s hand. Still a bit dazed, but knowing to trust his raven of thought, he spoke into the shell.

“Librarian,” he said.

The intended recipient of that call, of course, was dead already. The powers that operated the soundboard on these intraPlacial lines of communication, however, quickly conferred and agreed that his murderer was the natural inheritor of the title, and directed the spirit to take notice of the sound of the ocean emanating from a small object sitting upon an end table.

* * * * *

Jen stuck the beige blade through the interior of the single whirling gear. Despite the fact that the cog remained completely disconnected from the remainder of the factory’s process, all progress ground to a halt. Jen wiped the sweat off her brow and various beige-tinged bodily fluids off of her hospital gown. Killing the fragments had been a welcome but unproductive distraction. Now she needed to—

“Caw,” interrupted a raven, entering through the broken factory window. ”I am to lead you to the king,” it explained curtly, landing on her shoulder.

“His Majesty requests me on the front lines?” asked Jen.

”His liege has opted for a tactical retreat,” chided the raven. ”A tactic with which you are well familiar.”

”Can it.” Jen walked out of the factory into the shadows of the Silver City, which now spread out in all directions. The raven pointed with one wing, and Jen began to walk.

”You remember what this Place used to look like,” said Muninn. It wasn’t a question.

”Will look like,” corrected Jen. “This is just... a complicated past. This isn’t my home.”

”The past is everybody’s home,” countered the raven. ”It’s what we all secretly wish to go back to after a busy day at work.”

”Like I said, it’s not my past. Everything that happens here, I have a friend who I know is going to take care of it, because he already has. That’s the theory, anyway.”

An Amalgam fragment peered at Jen out of a storefront. “EVERYTHING MUST GO,” read a sign, completely honestly. They did not appear to be selling anything. ”We all owe responsibilities to the past,” nagged the raven. ”You have spent years neglecting yours.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure if I were a mythological incarnation of memory that just fell out of a king’s ass—remember that?—I’d feel differently, but as it stands—“

”Do you even remember why you left?”

”I got bored. The queen business just turned into another sort of real life.”

”A fine narrative, my once-queen,” mocked Muninn. ”A note-perfect ironic twist on the narrative of rousing adventure that is your life. (You’ll want to turn left into this alley lest Sir Cedric come this way.) It is a lie that has suited you fine thus far, but now the time for lies is past.”

Jen shrugged her shoulder very suddenly, throwing the bird off-balance. She ducked into the indicated alley and traced the patterns of the fire escapes above her, saying nothing for a good while. “You’re just a stupid bird,” she finally said, petulantly.

”You cannot lie to your memory, your formal majesty,” warned Muninn. ”I can lie to you, if I wish, but never you me.”

The alley swallowed girl and bird. Somewhere not far away, a fire raged.

Originally posted on MSPA by Dragon Fogel.

---

It had been nearly an hour since Arkal had begun his work. After a quick request to the snail to be quiet and let him concentrate, the smith had managed to craft a sword, a shield, a hammer, a club, a lance, a morningstar, and the front half of a suit of armor from the walls of his nonexistant prison. He now had a veritable arsenal that he couldn't see or touch.
He'd started calling the material the walls weren't made of "Stuff", for lack of a better alternative. And an hour of working with it had taught him surprisingly little.
The exact nature of the Stuff was a mystery. But the blacksmith's senses were becoming more honed to it; he still couldn't see it, of course, but he was now able to see where it was pointedly not existing.
That turned out to be most of the room. There was a lot of Stuff.
In fact, it seemed there was never less Stuff. Whatever Arkal took from the walls was quickly replenished; unsurprising, given its ethereal nature. Clearly, Arkal's smithing was not going to let him chisel out an escape route.
His only chance, then, was understanding the Stuff's true nature - how it worked, what it was. But as he finished the back plate of the armor, he also felt he had learned all he could from working with it. If he was going to discover anything new, he would have to try using it.
He donned his newly-crafted armor, and promptly fell to the floor under its immense weight.

Yskalt the snail was perplexed. What was the glorious human overlord doing? He'd been sitting there for nearly an hour, just hammering away at nothing. And then he suddenly fell over. Was this truly humanity's champion?
He matched the Order of the Silver Hand's prophecies well enough; he was human, he had a glorious beard, he was well-built, he was here for a battle, and he carried a silver object. Granted, Yskalt had been expecting someone younger, but clearly that was merely a limitation of his inferior nonhuman mind. A human would have realized that the hero could just as easily be someone older and more experienced.
But was this the one they had been waiting for all this time, ever since the Order's founding two weeks ago? He hardly seemed up to the task.
He shuddered. His faith was wavering. He wished he could speak to one of the prophets, surely they could reassure him, tell him that this was indeed the savior, and that he would bring about humanity's ultimate triumph.
But that was no option now. The wicked Hector had found the Order ten days ago, and locked away most of its members. Only one of the four prophets had evaded him; the second had been executed promptly; the third driven to madness by the Jailer; and the fourth was deemed the most dangerous, and held in the most secure section of the prison.
Indeed, Yskalt's only solace in this time was the thought that humanity would ultimately triumph, even without the Order's direct aid. At first, he had been delighted to see the human savior, sure that he would destroy the inferior nonhumans and bring divine perfection to the Place. Now he found himself wondering if the champion had succumbed to a heart attack.

It was hopeless.
What could Arkal do? He had fought the Amalgam before, before it had attained as much power as it had now, and he had failed. It was only through sheer chance that he had even been able to create a weapon that was remotely effective.
This was beyond him. He was useless here. The Amalgam would win, no matter what he did. He might not even be able to escape if they assimilated him again.
And would they even do him that favor? He had turned on them. They'd see him as a traitor to humanity, and make an example of him.
He couldn't turn to the others to help; if he couldn't craft a worthwhile weapon, what use was he to Jen? And Xadrez was stubborn. Even if he could be convinced to help, he'd be more useful without Arkal getting in his way.
There was no chance. Certainly no chance that involved him.
He was doomed. He would never see his home again.
He would never see his sons again.
No.
He would see his sons again.
He would be a father they could be proud of.
A father who faced overwhelming odds, for the sake of what he truly believed in.

"So that's what the Stuff is," he said suddenly.
Arkal stood up, picked up his anvil and forge, then picked up the rest of his intangible arsenal with one hand. Their combined weight was less than a feather. But they'd get the job done.
He walked out of his cell, towards the snail.
"You can talk again," he said. "I'm done."
Yskalt breathed a sigh of relief.
"Forgive your unworthy servant, oh exalted human," Yskalt begged. "I was beginning to doubt you. I see I never should have."
"If you want to get out of here, you're the one you need to stop doubting," Arkal replied.
"Only a man who knows himself is truly free," the Jailer added.
Yskalt simply stared at his savior oddly.
"I do not understand, oh valiant human. I am an inferior. I have always been inferior."
"Well, if you want to stay in this prison for the rest of your life, keep telling yourself that," Arkal shrugged. "So tell me more about what exactly I'm going to do here."
"I know little," Yskalt apologized. "I have but heard the prophecies secondhand. Our prophets would know more, but..."
Yskalt turned towards one of the other prisoners, a small urn with an alligator's head sticking out of it. The alligator mumbled something incomprehensible; Arkal thought he could make out the words "toast" and "yellowjacket".
"That is one of our four prophets, and as you can see, he is not the most informative at the moment. If you wish to speak to another, the easiest way would be to search the deepest part of the prison. But..."
Yskalt turned towards a doorway in the distance.
"I know little of that place. Only that it is where they keep the prisoners deemed most dangerous. As such, I imagine you would have a difficult time getting out."
Arkal smiled.
"I'll manage."
He walked off. Just before entering the door, he turned back to the snail.
"I hope you find your way out of there. I'd be lying if I said it were easy, but it's within your power."
He walked through the doorway. Yskalt simply stared at him, puzzled.
But then again, how could his inferior nonhuman mind possibly grasp the wisdom of the divine?

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.

Originally posted on MSPA by Dragon Fogel.

---

The door led to a dark spiral stairwell. The air was damp, and thick with Stuff. It was no obstacle to Arkal now, though he wondered just what sort of prison he'd find at the bottom that needed such protection.

The stairwell seemed to continue forever, and more than once Arkal wondered if it did, if he had simply stepped into an endless prison of stairs and this prophet was simply walking deeper for eternity. Would he even be able to catch up?

But as the thought crossed his mind the third time, Arkal realized that it was getting harder to proceed through the Stuff that filled the stairwell. This was a security measure, he realized. The more you doubted you would reach the bottom, the longer it would take.

And perhaps that would work in reverse. Arkal marched down with conviction, certain that he would reach the bottom as soon as he turned the next bend in the stairway.

And as he rushed down, a doorway greeted him, a light shining through its frame. It was just as he thought.

Of course, he was on guard now. The nature of the prison was becoming clearer; and though he was better-suited to it than most of the prisoners, he still had no idea how exactly this dungeon would try to trap him. He stepped through the door, expecting the worst.

He hadn't been expecting a bright sunny day.

***

Emma Broderburg had been expecting a bright sunny day. Every day had been like that for her, after all. The fact that the sun was a drastically different color didn't change anything; she had only experienced sunny days even in worlds that had no sun.

"Are you certain you wish to see the Silver City?" the unicorn asked. "I know nothing of its nature, of course, but I can tell it is a wicked place."

"It's all right," Emma assured him. "Cedric won't harm me unless he has to."

The unicorn trotted on, carrying Emma up a hill. It didn't have to avoid any ant-castles, because there were none in its path. At the top, an old man in a chair waved at them.

"Hello, little girl!" the Chairman declared happily.

"I'm twenty-five," Emma explained.

"Don't mind him," whispered the unicorn. "I've been this way before. He calls everyone 'little girl', I heard he even called the King that once."

"I'm the Chairman," he continued, unperturbed. "For a mere penny, or similar token of insignificant value, I'll tell you what sort of chair your soul is."

Emma reached into her pocket and pulled out a penny.

"Let me down," she said.

The unicorn did, of course, but not without doubts.

"I don't think you should take him up on his offer," he said.

"It's just a penny," she replied. "And it's not as if I'll have anywhere else to spend it."

She dropped the penny in the Chairman's open palm. His smile grew wide.

"At last! Oh, how I've waited for this day! At last, a chance to see the chair in someone's soul!"

He stared at Emma for nearly a minute.

He gasped.

"Can't accept this, I'm afraid," he said, tossing the penny back to her. "Terribly sorry, it doesn't seem to be working right now. Come back tomorrow."

Emma put the penny back in her pocket, and climbed onto the unicorn's back once more.

"That's a shame," she said sadly. "I was really hoping to find out."

"So he's just a fraud," the unicorn muttered as it trotted towards the Silver City. "Guess he couldn't bear to keep up the act in front of you."

As the unicorn marched away, the old man was left muttering to himself.

"A chair so wondrous cannot possibly exist," he said, dumbfoundedly. "To lay eyes on such a soul is worth at least a thousand pennies!"

***

Arkal found himself in some sort of village. The doorway had, unsurprisingly, vanished behind him; he was standing outside the wall of a candy shop.

A few of the villagers stared at him as he walked down the road; but mostly they kept to themselves. Humans were a rarity in the Place, but far from nonexistent, and Arkal looked more or less like the sort of human the Place tended to produce. And so he generated little attention as he made his way to the town square.

Here, he noticed two odd things. The first was the man behind the podium in the center of the square, who was babbling about the inevitable victory of the Amalgam and the Hand of Silver. The other was that the villagers seemed to be ignoring him; an ankylosaur walked past the podium and knocked it over with a stray swing of his tail and nobody save the speaker seemed to notice.

"Must be the prophet," Arkal concluded. He approached the podium just as the prophet picked it up, clearly frustrated.

He was dressed well for a prisoner; overdressed, in fact. He seemed to be wearing multiple coats and shirts, and appeared to have chosen them for how poorly they went together. A large hat covered his head, goggles obscured his eyes, and a pair of thick scarves covered what was left. Arkal wondered if there was an actual person under there or it was just a pile of clothes. Either option seemed possible in the Place.

"May I ask your name, prophet?" Arkal asked him.

"What does it matter?" he replied, his words muffled by his scarves. "I'm just a stranger to you."

"Not that strange compared to what I've seen already," Arkal said, undeterred. "So why are they 'keeping' you here?"

"They fear the truth," the stranger replied. "The truth I have seen."

"And what is this truth?"

The stranger laughed, or perhaps coughed; it was hard to distinguish one noise from another under those thick scarves.

"It is as I just said. The false Progenitor will be punished for his betrayal of humanity. The Silver City will rise, and the Place will join the rest of the multiverse. Humanity's ascension will be complete, and all else shall be destroyed."

"Sounds boring," Arkal mused. "I mean, what would I even make in a world like that? Humanity's a pretty mediocre material."

"It is not a world for you, traitor," the stranger said. "You turned your back on your race. You're even lower than we are."

"We? You mean your snail friend and the rest of your little cult?"

"All insignificant. But at least we have the wisdom to be aware of it, to acknowledge the necessity of our demise. And to work to hasten it."

Arkal puzzled over this for a bit.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because that is how it must be. You cannot comprehend it. If you could, you would have opened your mind to the Amalgam."

"I tried that once. Didn't care much for it. I mean, it was the most amazing experience for a few minutes, but then it just wasn't working out for me."

For the first time in the conversation, it was the stranger who seemed dumbstruck.

"Do you mean to tell me you left the Amalgam? How?"

Arkal shrugged.

"I don't know the technical details. One moment, I wanted nothing more than to be there forever, then the next moment there was something I wanted more than that. So I stepped out and went to work."

The stranger lost his composure completely, slamming his gloved fist down on the podium.

"No! The Amalgam cannot be rejected, it can only reject! You must have angered it!"

"Probably did, after I tried to kill it. That does tend to get most things pretty upset, even if they're beyond mortal comprehension."

"The Amalgam is perfection! It is the future of humanity, no, the future of everything! To deny it is to deny the Progenitor!"

"That's the second time you've mentioned a Progenitor," Arkal mused. "First you mentioned a false one, now I guess this is the 'true' one. So what is it, exactly?"

"The Progenitor is salvation! Only through the Progenitor can all achieve its purpose! Your pathetic traitorous mind cannot comprehend the Progenitor's grand design!"

Arkal was beginning to realize that the conversation was headed nowhere. The stranger was frantic, and nothing he said made any sense. He turned to leave.

"Then I guess I'll have to take my pathetic traitorous mind elsewhere," he said calmly.

"If they'll allow you to," the stranger sneered. "You've gained quite the audience."

It was true; dozens of villagers had wondered why this human had been talking to himself, and judging by the expressions on their faces, they had come to an unpleasant conclusion.

"He must have been communicating with Hoss!" a seven-foot tall penguin declared. "I knew he was a filthy spy!"

"Moo!" the cow next to him declared approvingly.

"No doubt. Look at that big hunk of silver on his back," a mole piped up. "I bet it's gonna make another of those cities!"

"Moo!" the cow agreed angrily.

Arkal sighed, and pulled out the club made of Stuff.

"I really don't want to hurt any of you," he began.

"Yeah, you just want us eradicated when the Amalgam assimilates the Place!"

"We're not afraid of some dumb human! Get him!"

"Moo!"

Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.

---

The map of the underground was a silvery spider on the wall, spreading out into the fringes of the Silver City as Jen traced her finger along the route that Muninn pointed out to her. Something about the world was becoming more angular. Her hair hung down a little straighter. Her thoughts proceeded more logically than they ought have. “We can’t be this far away from Hector, can we?” she asked the raven. “We should be going on foot.”

”The streets of the Silver City are deceptive, my Queen—and so am I. You’ve been walking in circles.” The bird shrugged his wings innocently.

Jen sighed. “There’d better be a point to all this. I had enough of a spirit quest last round.”

”Yes, your spirit is prepared for battle,” admittted Muninn. ”You’re ready to face Xadrez, yes, and Kath too, should she raise her beautiful-ugly head again. But the Charlatan changed the course your spirit must take.” Jen descended further into the dark tunnel, hopping gracefully over a turnstyle. ”Are you prepared to see your home destroyed? To see Kracht again? See, this battle is no longer fair for anybody. Unfairness is the root of the Charlatan’s power.”

”What’s Kracht have to do with any of this?”

”You know. You can feel him.”

In this, at least, Memory did not lie to Jen. Something green and young and rough around the edges was marching around the periphery of her magical senses—something that would take more than a Silver City to break.

“He’s the key to all this, isn’t he?” asked Jen. “We’re in another one of his time loops.”

Muninn squawked. ”A key needs a lock. A rock is just a material.”

Tunnels stretching out to either side of Jen stretched endlessly into the darkness. She stood behind the yellow line. ”The girl. The third contestant.” Jen searched her memory, found it coming easier to her in the presence of the raven. “Right before he died, he mentioned an ‘Emma Broderburg.’ Last round I spoke to what I guess must have been her sister.”

”A lock is a much more delicate instrument than a key,” advised Muninn. ”One mustn’t force it.”

A distant roaring. Either Jen’s train was approaching, or Cedric had found a weighty monster to kill, up above. “Kracht was forced, in the end,” Jen noted, almost conversationally. “Turned into a door and then kicked down. Imagine the panic. He was living his life according to a routine, and then, just... everything falls apart.” Muninn didn’t respond. “Nothing lasts forever, I guess.”

Deep in the tunnel there shone a light. ”Kracht was the last of your toy soldiers,” suggested the raven. ”You cared for him as you care for a piece of property.”

”That’s not fair,” dismissed Jen. The train barreled down the tunnel, shrieking as though in pain or anger.

”It’s not an insignificant care,” mocked the raven. ”You always cared more for things than for people.”

The brakes locked into place, not gracefully. Sparks shot up as the wheels skidded on the rail. The train emerged into the station a little too fast, a silver bullet with no windows and a barely perceptible door. There was nothing elegant about the Silver City, Jen saw. It was not the groundwork for a human-dominated utopia but an ugly silver paint-splatter over everything sensible people might appreciate about the world. To Muninn she said, “That’s not fair either. The lines between people and things are blurred here.”

The train reached a halt, its doors snapping open hungrily. The raven flew inside and beckoned. ”Toy soldiers,” he repeated. ”You were supposed to be twenty-three then and a queen grown.”

”Also not fair.” Jen leapt inside the train and the doors shut behind her. Inside the car dim fluorescent lights reflected off every surface, accentuating the lack of windows. The former monarch took a seat on an uncomfortable bench. “I was eleven from the moment I came here through the moment I left. Only my body aged. And that was a temporary effect.”

The raven eyed her judgmentally.

“I was a kid,” Jen repeated.

The train began to roll along the track with a metallic howl. Memory ruffled its black feathers began to speak.

* * * * *

The adult Jen had an athletic, underfed look, fidgety and tightly wound. Her dimples wobbled a bit, her hair clawed at her face like external veins, and her eyes were elsewhere. If it weren’t for the gold lace delicately sewn into her swishy knee-length green dresses she would have looked more like an assassin than a queen, a force of chaos rather than order. She sat in her throne cross-legged or not at all. She could be called, but never summoned; sought, but never found. In those last couple of years if Jen felt that you needed her she would come to you, never when you expected her and frequently when you weren’t sure you wanted her around at all.

In spite of the wobbliness of monarchical authorities in those days things were peaceful in the Place. The major troublemakers and schemers were banished, assimilated, or dead. The monsters were more mischievous than cruel, held in check by a burgeoning population of heroes and adventurers. Wealth and magic poured out of forgotten places; wishes were granted; the world made just enough sense for ordinary people to get by but not so much that extraordinary people couldn’t find extraordinary circumstances to work with. The gods gambled with low stakes, content for the most part to sit out on the porch of the world and watch the sun set over an era.

Just before it went down over the horizon you could sometimes see a flash of green.

In the palace those days there was a constant creaking, a low groan like something about to snap. This was the grinding of the joints of the toy soldiers, who made up the majority of the palace staff nowadays, most of the Queen’s original followers having since been given minor dominions or sent abroad on important tasks. The toy soldiers were not quite inhuman enough that you would feel polite sitting in a room with one and not offering it a seat or something to drink. Sometimes they would even accept with a gruff and wooden “Thank you” out of their copper-hinged mouths.

There were toy soldiers of all sizes, genders and demographics, some dressed anachronistically in the styles of another dynasty, others spiffily reflecting the fashions of Queen Jen’s mythical home. They cooked food, they washed dishes, they tended to the horses, they saw to the defense of the palace, they alternatingly welcomed and turned away guests. A wind-up toy cat usually failed to catch the rats, who were alerted to its presence by the ticking of its gears. A clockwork cuckoo marked the time and sang songs of broken families and discontent. Queen Jen, who appreciated both craftmanship and servitude and who was becoming increasingly dismayed by the notion that she was a woman grown now and would have to put aside her toys and childhood things and be a proper queen, loved her wooden soldiers, considering them to be the perfect servants.

The creator of the toymen was none other than the toymaker Klaus Gepetrovich, one of a long tradition of powerful magicians in the Place refashioning themselves as Santa Claus analogues. This one, though he had the magic and the dedication, lacked the physical presence to be a proper Kringle—he was a were-stick-insect, dark and thin and rough about the skin even on a new moon, beardless, wide-eyed, and who smiled only in epileptic bursts. On the full moon he stretched fifteen feet, coiling around his toyshop and working uninterrupted for three days at a stretch. There was something about the toymaker that inspired pity, some quality about his thin and trembling face that begged decent people to take him in and cruel people to cause him pain. Jen had saved him from a malicious toy drive puppeteered in secret by the Infraternity of the Krampus Campus on the southern borders of the Place a year back, and had taken him under her wing—specifically, under the northern wing of the palace, establishing a toyshop-slash-arboretum in a vast unused space that had probably once been something other than a cave.

Down in his workshop, Klaus didn’t have a list of who was being naughty or nice, but he did have a calendar--a novelty item promising a new made-up word every day--and made sure to remember his queen’s birthday. The made-up word for the day in question was “vunderdaut,” an adjective describing the state of foolishness one enters between a run of uncanny good luck and its inevitable reversal. Jen, who usually made sure to read the calendar hanging up on the wall when she went to visit Klaus, was distracted in this instance by her birthday present, which stretched wall-to-wall across the workshop.

“You shouldn’t have,” gushed the queen, surveying the scene laid out before her. It was a miniature replica of the entire Place made up in green felt and wood, with mountains carved out of diamonds, blue-dyed water pumping out tiny waves and tidal patterns, and a dollhouse palace that opened up to reveal the miniature toy soldiers toiling away inside.

“Of course I should have!” assured Klaus. “Anything for milady’s birthday.” His thin legs tramped a careful path over village and road, hill and stream, circling Jen possessively. “Milady likes?”

“She loves,” corrected Jen, ducking her head as the lantern sun swung overhead, illuminating the tiny caves hidden deep in the tiny forests. Klaus bristled. At this stage in his lycanthropism he used words only as a formality, resisting his natural urge to communicate through chemicals and the movement of his antennae. Jen nimbly stepped over lake and meadow to survey the floating moon, which spun lazily around the miniature Place. It was a beautiful moon, catching the light of the lantern sun and spilling its reflection in precise phases. “Is this real moonrock?” she asked.

“Yes,” confirmed the werestick. “But the true significance of the gift is yet to be known! Behold!” A bug-leg stuck out of the folds of Klaus’s robes and flicked a switch. With a surprisingly loud horn-blast, a delicately crafted model train snaked out of a cliff face and made a leisurely circuit of the model, rattling in playful ellipses around Jen’s legs, wafting potpourri-scented steam into the air. Klaus knelt down beside the locomotive, peering into the tiny glass windows. “The beginnings of a toy infrastructure. Standardized time, standardized distance. A beautiful, simple wind-up nation for the young queen to play with.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Jen. The moonrock, she understood, was exacerbating Klaus’ lycanthropism, bringing out more and more of his stick-mind at the expense of the man. Having more reason to distrust humen than insects on the whole, she didn’t think much of it. “Just remember that this would only work in the toy-world,” she reminded her toymaker. “I destroyed all the real standardizations years ago.”

Klaus made a highly ambiguous clicking noise. “I noticed,” he said. “My calendar has been acting strange of late.”

Jen’s head turned to the wall. Vun – der – daut (a): the state of foolishness one enters between a run of uncanny good luck and its inevitable reversal. “It’s not my birthday,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” said Klaus. “Come receive the rest of your present.”

Jen became cognizant all at once of the noise pollution that she had visited upon the castle through her reliance on the toy soldiers. Ticking, whirring, creaking. A bomb about to go off, or a building about to collapse. An old woman’s body pushed beyond endurance. Vun – der – daut. The queen followed her toymaker into the back of his workshop, wrapping her hands around the spot on her hip where she ought to be keeping her sword.

The model train arrived at the dollhouse palace. Choo-choo. A little doll dressed all in green stepped across the drawbridge and boarded. The train departed, carrying the toy queen with it.

* * * * *

The silver bullet cut its way through the tunnels as the Silver City dug them out, burrowing deeper and deeper below the Place, upsetting gold veins and silver arteries, awakening things that ought to stay buried. Jen, listening to Muninn whisper in her ear, was only vaguely aware of the train’s movement as the rail sloped gradually downward, resolving itself into a near-vertical helix.

The silver train was no toy, had no whistle to warn passersby of its approach, released no steam. Its exhaust was the same foul mixture of heavy metals and fumes that seemed to seep out of every pore of the silver city like sweat off of some immense and evil-made golem. Jen didn’t notice her own vertigo and disorientation until the car leveled out and stopped abruptly with a snarl and a hiss.

The doors opened and admitted several dozen indistinct beige Amalgam fragments holding what appeared to be empty goldfish bowls in their arms. They milled into the train, squeezing shoulder-to-shoulder into every available seat, making half-intelligible small talk though their ill-defined mouths.

Muninn squawked and flew up into the carry-on rack above the seats. Jen, repulsed by the sticky quality of the fragments and the cheap, rough fabric of their orange jumpsuits, elected to stand, holding onto a pole in the middle of the car. A single fragment shared the pole with her, clinging to it easily with one hand, clutching his goldfish bowl in the other as the train took off again. He looked at his wrist expectantly, tapping his foot. “You know, you don’t have a watch,” Jen pointed out, trying to make conversation.

The beige man tried to roll its eyes and succeeded merely in making a bloop sound and spreading an eerie ripple across its face. ”Timezz mezzerd in pruhgress,” it explained. ”Wuddur thabbordurz zof thuzZilver Zitty? Do thennemies of-hummannaddy ztill walk thuh-Hurth? In theez metricks dewey mezzure thuppazzage of time-hyeer.”

”And does it measure up?” asked Jen. “Everything going according to schedule?”

”Thuhinnvizzible Hand alwuhzz makes thuChrainz runnontime,” gargled the fragment defensively. ”Ztill therezz much wuurk tuhbead duhn.”

The train suddenly accelerated and began to slope upwards, leaving Jen clinging desperately to her pole with both arms. The fragments sat calmly and affixed their goldfish bowls to their jumpsuits. Helmets. Space helmets. Jen only hadn’t seen it because the idea seemed somehow more absurd than empty goldfish bowls.

“What kind of work?” she dared to ask over the ambient noise of the train’s ascent.

”Whir gohunduh duhstroy thuh moon,” explained the fabric, his already distorted voice muffled by his helmet. ”Ur help wud be muh-chappreshee-hated.”

Hector, deprived of his memory and instructed in caution by his shoulder-perched thought, stayed back from the front of the stampede, merely directing it in Cedric’s direction. Even his seemingly limitless power had been taxed in the creation of this assault, which would at best prove a distraction to the fire-knight—dragons, rhinoceri, big cats, large dogs, landsharks, low-flying magnet-eagles, chinchillae and chimarae of all sorts, all funneled through the main street of the Silver City in a single direction, accelerating constantly as a natural result of their incongruity with their environment and with each other.

Cedric stood in the middle of the square, five towers rising around him in the shape of a hand. The primal force of the animal kingdom, unleashed by a boy-king too afraid to fight his own battles, bore down on him. The perfect knight decided that the resultant battle would not be an effective use of his time. He had already sown an environment inhospitable towards all this pesky life. The problem would resolve itself without his aid.

Before the wave of flesh and claw and fang and tusk bore down on him, the nose of a great subway train burst out of the ground beneath him and carried him laughing smugly into the air. Hyenas, apes, ostriches all circled around the event, some banging harmlessly off the side of the car without decelerating, others stopping to look, only to be trampled by the rest of the multitude. The stampede dispersed, slipping between the five finger-towers like so much sand.

Emma Broderburg watched an octopedal alligeightor and four or five penguolins in armor-plated tuxedos pass by on the sidewalk, seeming to her to be hurried but polite. She coughed. In her weakened state, she was possessed by an instinctive need for shelter, for a home to rest her head, for a home-cooked meal. The Silver City was not inviting in this fashion. The doorways and awnings were all sharp angles, hard concrete and leering statuary. Amalgam fragments peered out of the windows in the way one peers out one’s window when one is holding a gun or at least a baseball bat out of sight.

She coughed again.

”There you are,” Hector said, stepping out from behind an alley and immediately realizing his mistake. Humans, he supposed, all looked the same to him, especially in the shadows of the buildings, which seemed to cast an aura of conformity, reducing browns and auburns and blondes to a dull beige, rendering individuals into averaged-out pieces of a whole.

The girl looked at him quizzically, holding her arms. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t look very much like Jen the First at all, he realized. He pitied her instantly. “Sorry,” he said. “My mistake. Thought you were someone else.”

The girl wiped her nose. ”One of those faces,” she suggested. She did not have one of those faces; rather, she had one of those faces.

Hector looked up. The bullet (which he saw more as a rocket than a subway train, it being perfectly sealed and vertically oriented) had left the ground completely and was making rapid progress out of sight towards the moon. He could no longer make out the figure of Sir Cedric clinging to its nose, but could easily imagine the monster-slayer looking down at him and grinning. He shuddered and turned back to the girl. “Do you need a place to stay?” he asked her.

The girl looked around contemplatively. ”I’m looking for someone,” she said. Then: ”I don’t know if I’ll be here for long.”

Hector shrugged. He reached his hand out imploringly. “Come see my flying whale,” he begged. “I have to take care of some things, but I can get you where it’s warm.” This was, to some extent, a pretense—without his memory he was not certain exactly what he was supposed to “take care of,” though he suspected there was something.

”The belly of a whale sounds nice,” admitted the girl.

Huginn gave an impatient caw.

Kracht was lost, or pretty sure the gods were fucking with him.

The first path "upwards" as dictated by Moses had trailed uncertainly off into a trepdiatious end at the mouth of a cave, which smelt in equal parts industrial, abandoned, and of high-proof ethanol. The hummingbird in attendance thrummed uneasily, landing like a sunbeam upon Kracht's shoulder. It laid down its flower, appreciating the rocklike steadiness of Kracht's unbreathing torso.

"Izzer wrong way we've been givvin, zhir."

"Xadrez' doing, then?"

"Th'Librerrien-Gen'ril? Wouldn' think it, leazterways wither time zhignature in m'heart, szhir. We're zhuppozed t'be thirr's fazht we can. Race ter the top, winner take all."

Kracht tasted the air, and felt worse for it. "A shortcut, then?" he asked, uncertain.

"Weren't any tunnels in th' Feethills, back when... y'know. th' Library jes' zhtood on a cliff and not this zhpire." The hummingbird hmmmed in recollection. "Great-Grampzh-Hummer, actual, uzhter talk about the Mines of Middling Hill, but they weren't carved've th'rock - th' Zhiren-golems sang th'gems out. Great-grampzh zhmelt've the peyote-flower a lot, though, 'n I think I rimmember 'im claiming spezhil dragonbreath was what painted the zhky, so... pinches of zhalt."

Kracht didn't get far down the tunnel (his companion all too happy to wait at the entrance) before he ran into something, the sort of something lacking the tactile signature of a point where two worlds met - but still left your constituent elements scrambling for each other. Pretty sure of what he was dealing with, but figuring it was too late to turn back, he reached about in the now-pitch black until his faintly glowing digits alighted on a door.

It was of jet; the hinges handle and ominous knocker all filigree and tarnished silver. Kracht ignored the entire arrangement, having seen quite enough arrangements to suit any man or mineral. The door creaked, and Kracht flinched, and there was something behind there acutely aware of his presence and making no attempt to hide nor show its omniscient face.

Kracht slipped in, closed the door. Two wing-backed armchairs had their backs to him, conspiring to each other and the ink-black flames crackling soundlessly in the fireplace. Death, slumped in a seat and out of Kracht's sight, extended a suited arm through the fire-backed rift between the chairs. The shadow it threw across Kracht crackled faintly as it crossed him, the murmurs of a gramophone's needle in a record's curves.

“It's been a while,” said Death. Kracht made a glacial noise of discontent. “Why don't you take a seat? No?”

Death sighed; dignified the deathless green aberration by unfolding from his seat. Kracht had already drawn a weapon, or at least a silver talisman which emitted a sort of bluish anti-glow that either radiated darkness or gently drew in light. Death glanced at it, something behind his mask giving a “tch” of disapproval.

“Enough of that.”

Kracht couldn't really bare his teeth, settling instead for expressionless disapproval. “Enough of you, Redeemer. Did you not get the message from last time that I'm finished with you?”

“Clear as Arabic arsenic,” smirked Death. His hand gripped the armchair's back, magician's white gloves hanging a little hollow over the bones therein. “Which makes me just as curious as you what brings me back to my den. Have the battles finally made it to my bolthole?”

Kracht deliberated, the shade in front of him a neutered, muted, but indelible reminder of the true enemies. The ones the Battlers could've all banded together to slay and bring peace to the Multiverse, if he were telling the tale to Emma. Things were simpler when all your problems could be ascribed to higher beings of unquestionably wayward morality. People were messy. Mortality was messy, or at least that was Kracht's interpretation at his most cynical. Annihilation of some cosmos-spanning force, by comparison, was lacking enough in a frame of reference that your mind could just grapple with the idea for a bit before discarding it.

Gestalt'n (with Hoss at the reins) had just about finished ripping All-Stars a new one, and the first seeds of doubt were scattered across the Network that their commander's intentions were less than noble. It was still all about killing the Grandmasters, back then. The Controller had slayed the radio silence, joining the still-under-wraps-then human side in the upcoming war, offering a list of his traitrous agents as tribute. By the time the Monitor was decommissioned, the Executor executed, and the memories of innocent bystanders' winnowed out and de-demonised from the actual traitors of the Network (who were probably only among half the list of the lynched), the Controller was away laughing.

They couldn't trust the Grandmasters after that, although the Hoss-induced xenocide didn't leave anyone much time to reconcile. Kracht and Eureka were already fighting their own, ((comparatively) cosmically negligible) fight against the forces of the Chrome Witch, whose unceremonious devourment of Sirius hadn't ended the round because the Observer had either done a runner, or had already died and local linearity was only just catching up.

Kracht blinked, suddenly uncertain as to whether he'd intruded or if he was the one being intruded upon. This Redeemer wasn't the most imposing of the Grandmasters, and being more akin to a collective of unknowable cosmic forces it was hard to be consumed by terror at the thought of them anyway. Not the way a good old-fashioned racist cyborg could do for you.

Redeemer didn't scare Kracht, and Death seemed mostly content with the fact. “They're almost over,” Kracht said slowly, the fact just now occurring to himself. “Have been for a while, if the survivors amongst you Grandmasters turning tail was any indication.”

“The prime-time debut of the latest propaganda extravaganza, with your host the Amalgam, exclusive to the Network Affiliated With The Network?”

“Yeah.” Kracht would've realised aloud that his only realistic goal at this juncture was ensuring Emma never joined the ranks of the Silver Army, which would probably entail making a martyr of her. He pushed the thought aside, not least because the ex-Grandmaster before him was the last entity that needed to know about his personal problems. “That.”


“It's quite all right, you know,” said the Redeemer after a while, voice coming from where a friend might stand in solidarity, perhaps to clasp a hand on your radioactive shoulder. “Giving up on saving the multiverse.”

Kracht swatted at the voice; his fist found only scattering butterflies. He glared at one of the armchairs, which sported an extra pair of legs reclining out of them again. “Because subjugating it is so much easier, isn't it?”

“Kracht, please. It was a game to us,” hummed the Redeemer, apparently so disgusted with having to spell it out that it warranted another snooty sip of wine. “A pasttime. A distraction. A way to defer answering those unpleasant questions we asked of ourselves, when we escaped or transcended our universes of origin.”

The rock didn't bother asking what those questions were, but that didn't stop the Redeemer. “We were still motes in the extrastellar scheme, my dear Kracht. We could orchestrate the ruin of all the civilisations we pleased, but we could wave our hands and gesture all we pleased and the damn things still stood. We were tinkerers. Meddlers. We still built our towers brick by meticulous brick. Once we tired of that, and tired of seeing how far the Multiverse Proper extended, where else did we have left to turn?” A sip, a pause, before finishing the glass and casting it aside. “Our only recourse was to remind ourself, that no matter how insignificant we were, we could be as gods to the likes of you.”

Redeemer arched out of his chair again, voice and shadow and vintage fumes taking a languid stroll about the rock. “That's why Hoss is such a credible threat to us. Because he's delusional. Because whatever rational check we Grandmasters have when contemplating a path to true omnipotence, he lacks.”

Kracht had one of his moments where he envied the full gamut of emotion offered by a form of flesh and blood. He cracked a testy joint, though that only made him keener to punch the Redeemer (for lack of a more constructive course of action). “So. Local omnipotence wasn't fixing your existential angst, so you figured Death was a nobler post?”

“Zaire was a damned fool, and a travesty of a Redeemer at that,” snapped the Redeemer, temporarily displacing a digit or two in a sleight-of-wringing-hands. “Hoss' challenge was a trap, plain to see - no dissuading the boy despite it. Encouraged him, even.”

“So you killed him?”

“And I suppose-” a chipped and faded mask at his ear, a conspiratorial whisper without breath “-you'd prefer Hoss got the chance?”

“No, but-”

“Re-wrote the rules of death? Promised an eternal afterlife's suffering for all who opposed him, or better yet, differed too much? And realise it?”

Kracht would've retorted, but the Grandmaster had raised a chiding finger (from the armchair again, fuck these guys) and the mineral found his voice stopped.

“Zaire glorified death, pronounced himself tyrant of the afterlives. If I let the dead stay dead, my only crime is restoring to death its rightful dignity.”

“And murder.”

“Most foul,” shrugged the Redeemer.

“And kidnapping people and making them fight to the death.”

“A socially acceptable crime, at least in my social circles as we've already-”

“And the cameo rounds-”

“What was it you wanted, again?”

Kracht strode over and hurled the vacant armchair into a wall. Redeemer only 'tsk'ed, which didn't improve the mineral's mood any.

“I've got one job,” hissed Kracht, “and that's to find Xadrez and take back the Middle-Gem. So unless you're squatting in the Library's basement-”

“One moment.” The Grandmaster's focus wavered, in that palpable way they will. The next instant he was already standing to attention, straightening his suit and radiating alertness the way Grandmasters will when they're really more elsewhere.

“Oh, so now you'll take this seriously?”

Redeemer's retort was palming a dove out of nowhere, and snapping its neck. Kracht had no time for outrage before it fell through the floor, which had vanished into black with the rest of the room. The dove soundlessly hit the water, ink consuming white as the river's endless sigh rose into something almost audible.

They stood on the shore. The colourless, lightless sand squeaked in protest beneath Kracht's feet, like it knew he didn't belong here. A glance at the Redeemer only gave the strong impression that the very idea of his having feet was ludicrous, which tackled Kracht's mental defenses and left him with a headache.

“Are we waiting for a ferryman or some-”

“No. Norns, in case you were wondering.”

“Aren't those, like, tree spirits or something?”

“Mythology and post-existence in the Place is... whimsical. We'll put it that way. There's no real rhyme or reason to it, but if you must fight the General for the Middle-Gem in the Library itself, then being dredged up by a Norn is the fastest way to the Library. With my help, at any rate.”

The Redeemer shuffled back from the shore. Something sullen and very difficult to argue with lumbered atop the now-choppy water, all gunmetal grays and refinery stains.

“Do say hello to Peppi for me. Once you've saved the Multiverse and all.”

Kracht had no time to ask what kind of a name Peppi was for a mythical beast, before the Redeemer kicked him in the small of the back, pitching the mineral head over sinking heels into the Undercurrent.

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.

Arkal had dealt with more than a few angry mobs in his time. It happened when you traveled a lot and weren't afraid to speak your mind.

And he knew that fighting the mob never solved the problem. Even if you were strong enough to win the fight, you wouldn't change any minds.

Unfortunately, at the moment he wasn't in much of a position to avoid a fight. The mob was already on him, and it would be hard to get a word in edgewise. At least the Stuff would keep them away.

A two-legged cabbage leapt for Arkal's face. He knocked it away with his club, and it fell to the ground, muttering something about how it had failed its mother.

The crowd was stunned. From their point of view, Arkal had only held up a hand and repelled the cabbage. It gave him time to take out his shield while he tried to figure out how to calm the mob.

It didn't give him much more time than that, though.

"He's got powers from the Amalgam!" the seven-foot penguin shouted. "We can't hold back!"

The mob charged forward as one. The charge was mostly ineffective, as anyone who even touched the club or shield soon gave up and declared the fight hopeless, but their sheer numbers meant that a few of the smaller villagers made it past his defenses.

Arkal swatted a squirrel off his leg and a toad off his head. He couldn't keep this up, he knew. The Stuff's effects probably wouldn't last forever, and when the others got up, he'd be in trouble unless he managed to talk the crowd down.

"They're pathetic," the stranger said suddenly. "An entire village can barely scratch a single human. Worthless filth, afraid to accept their inferiority. Afraid to accept the Amalgam."

Arkal glared at the stranger. If this crowd weren't in the way, he'd punch the damn bastard in the face.

Then he smiled. The damn bastard had given him an idea.

"Please! Don't hurt me!" he cried, cowering under his shield. The villagers paused; this wasn't how they'd expected it to go.

"This doesn't make sense," a sea cucumber said. "Doesn't Hoss have billions of human agents? Trillions? However many -illions it is, he ought to have plenty who aren't cowardly."

"Could be a trick," a three-toed sloth chimed in. "Maybe he wants us to back off."

"What if he's just a distraction?" the seven-foot penguin asked. "Maybe he's supposed to get us all riled up so we don't notice another agent slipping through."

"Moo?"

"I swear! I'm not with Hoss! I'm not with the Amalgam! Please spare me, I'll do anything!" Arkal tried his best to sound pathetic; it was his only chance.

"You disgust me, traitor. I never thought I'd see a human beg for mercy from filth."

Arkal wanted to rip the stranger apart, but he couldn't let it show. He needed to seem as terrified as he could.

Of course, one of his sons was an actor. Arkal thought back to their infrequent conversations, and tried to remember if Eselt had shared any advice.

"The trick to acting, to showing strong emotion, is to be the character. When I was on the stage tonight, I was no longer Eselt the actor; I was Lord Saeto, the nefarious and cynical ruler of Ralthagon. And when the Beast of Ralthagon appeared, the beast Saeto thought was a mere legend, I could convey Saeto's terror as I did because it was my terror."

Arkal hadn't really understood it at the time; his strongest memory of The Beast of Ralthagon was the Beast itself, or rather its craftmanship. He'd had a good conversation with the carpenter afterwards.

He wished he had talked to his own son as much - to both of his sons.

And then he realized how to look frightened. He thought about never seeing his sons again, never having another chance to connect to them, to understand their own crafts a little more.

Arkal showed the crowd that terror. He felt that terror. It was no act; it was real.

And it was so strong that he collapsed under the weight of the Stuff.

The stranger had no idea what had just happened, unaware of even the existence of Stuff, let alone its properties. All he knew was that he wouldn't get to enjoy either the spectacle of a traitor to the human cause being torn apart by would-be allies, or the spectacle of a polluted village being purified by a single human.

Not that he deserved enjoyment, of course; he only deserved destruction, so that the human race might thrive without his filthy existence.

Vincent Forsteri became aware that the other villagers were staring at him. Somewhere in the last few minutes, the seven-foot tall penguin had been silently declared the leader of the mob, and now it seemed everyone else wanted him to make a decision.

Forsteri looked at Arkal cowering on the ground, helpless. It was unbelievable that this weakling would be an agent of Hoss, and yet there were still doubts in Forsteri's mind. Who had he been talking to? Why was he carrying an enormous silver lump?

After a few moments of contemplation, Forsteri came to a decision, and it was to let someone else make the decision so he couldn't be blamed for it.

"Let's take him to the Congress of Bastard," Forsteri declared. "It's the best way to settle this."

***

Arkal soon recovered from his self-induced terror; enough that the Stuff no longer weighed him down. He still tried to seem nervous, of course; a show of confidence might turn the mob against him once more.

Only a few villagers bothered to help him up and carry him to the Congress of Bastards, as the sign outside the decrepit building helpfully indicated. Forsteri awkwardly gestured to the half-detached door.

"Just go in," he said. "The Bastard will handle the rest."

Arkal thanked him for his kindness - still trying to sound nervous - and walked in as cautiously as he could. When he was inside, he finally let himself regain his composure, and marched down the hall. A once-ornate door, now covered in dust, lead to the main chamber; Arkal opened it, and found himself in a massive room with hundreds of empty seats.

He didn't see any sign of the Bastard he was looking for; only a small table with a piece of paper and an inkwell on it. There was writing on the paper, and Arkal supposed there was nothing for him to do except read it.

Dear Arkal of the Silver Anvil,

I am already aware of who you are and that you are not an associate of the Amalgam. You need not bother explaining your actions.

However, this is not to say that you are free to go. The Congress of Bastard has standards to uphold, after all. I could not grant you a blanket pardon even if I were so inclined to; the rules of the Congress state that by coming before us - well, me - you must face a trial.

To clarify, I do not mean that in the sense of a courtroom. Rather, I will ask you to perform a service for the Congress, and if you succeed in this task, you will be free. Of course, failure in the task will mean your death. You may also refuse the task, in which case you will face a life sentence.

I am fairly confident of what your choice will be, but for the sake of formality I need to ask you first.

Sincerely,
The Bastard

P.S. Speak your answer, I will be able to hear you.

"I'm going with the trial," Arkal sighed. "So what do I have to do?"

Arkal was unsurprised by the ink moving around on the page; perhaps if he had seen it before being deposited in a strange world by the Observer, he might have thought it odd, but by now it was simply routine.

Dear Arkal,

Thank you for the prompt reply. I will now explain the task before you.

As I believe you may be aware, the King's men recently captured the members of a human supremacist cult that had almost no humans in it. However, one of their leaders evaded capture.

Your task is to deal with him. The matter of whether he is captured alive or simply killed is left to your discretion, though in all likelihood the former will not be feasible.

I will provide transportation, all other details are your concern and not mine.

Sincerely,
The Bastard

"So, what, I have to find this guy? I've got no idea where he is! Or who, for that matter!"

Dear Arkal,

The idea behind trials is that they are not easy. Your transportation will be waiting outside.

Best of luck,
The Bastard

P.S. I do not advise asking further follow-up questions. I have given you sufficient information already.

P.P.S. Please replace me on the table before you leave or I will hold you in contempt of Congress.

Arkal grudgingly put down the letter and headed outside. He didn't see anything except the cow who had been part of the mob.

"Moo," she said, turning her head to look behind her.

"You're my ride, then?"

"Moo." She nodded.

"Well, okay then." Arkal climbed on her back. "I guess that bastard wasn't interested in giving me a saddle."

"Moo."

"Well, I've got no idea where we're supposed to go, so just head wherever you please."

"Moo!"

She flew off, leaving the Isle of Fuck This Isle behind.

I'll concede
you, you aberration,
you saved the multiverse a thousand times over
but
Maybe
just maybe
if you'd tried dying for the multiverse once
Just realised you're no better than the rest of us, no less ultimately meaningless in the machinations that drive these outer spaces
You could've saved yourself so much grief

Your winning streak only continued
after all
until the Observer tipped the board against you
You played into his hands Kracht
You summed your existence by his twisted metrics and look where it's gotten you
You donned the martyr's crown and the hero's sword because you thought you were special
Like the multiverse couldn't go on without you



The Moon

was one day past full, her black smirk askew and widening by the minute to a genuine smile as she danced staid circles with the sun. Her countenance was a purple that no interior decorating could fix, borrowed from an always-distant Father; her seas, of such tranquility that not even the Amalgam's forces could bring themselves to break it. Their toil was subdued; their task, hallowed.

Jen leapt into action, or at least leapt into the presumed-air and drifted the rest of the way into action. The apex of her jump brought the Place sliding into view, dizzyingly far below. Someone had completely messed up its geography, yanking the centre up into a series of mountains and rearranging the whole thing into a perfect circle. The Silver City encroached from all angles, occupying an edge of her vision whichever part of the Place she examined.

Jen landed atop the explosive, sprung from that, and sliced an Amalgonaut's head clean off. The other three met a similar fate, crumpling out of existence like so much hyperdimensional tissue paper. That left her with a gently-falling bomb, whose innards she impaled before shoving it up-and-awaywards for lack of better options.

"Moo!"

Came a cry of consternation. Jen couldn't place the accent, and the sun just got into her upside-down eyes when she tried to see who she'd almost kicked a bomb into.

Arkal considered for a moment grabbing it, but his ride moo!ed a protest and his smith's eye saw right through it as a devalued piece of a whole.

"Moo!" Arkal reached around for his suddenly-weightless forge at the peak of the jump, before the now-rapidly approaching Place Terrestria rose up to greet him. The silver-rimmed disc blurred into a forest, then a clearing in a grove of tangle-limbed pines.

The cow mooed a reassurance below Arkal, who dismounted. The air was dusted double purple with pollen and twilight. This patch of forest was called the Last Stand, and indeed was where the Pinezantium Consul picked as their resting spot after losing (in a series of sappy massacres) the Echoak War. The cow nodded at a cottage on the edge of the meadow, and Arkal espied something mostly humanoid dozing in a wicker chair on the porch.

"Does that man know where to find the cultist?"

"Moo."

"Right," grumbled Arkal. "That's really convenient."

"Moo!"

"And you just happened to know where this final cultist lived?"

"Moo," shrugged the cow.

"Don't you take that tone just because your story doesn't check out. You were trying to lynch me not twenty minutes ago."

"Moo!" retorted the cow. Then, "moo," as an afterthought.

"Huh," said Arkal. "Never really thought of it like that. Fair enough."



The Stars

were like the Fates, scattered cosmic children of dubious mythological position or origin. Much like the stars, it seemed, they were only there as an easy reference so you knew just how far from home you were. There wasn't all that much special about the stars in the Place's night sky, except you could pick one out and know it was your own (non-heliocentric systems of origin need not apply), and you could have that noted down by the Librarian in a handsome black-bound book made specifically for the purpose - unless someone had already beaten you to the big sparkly one you'd picked out, in which case you could always choose another.

The Catastrologus Ludunt Puerum was presently opened out to its very sexy centrefold, which unfolded in a very sexy and impossible way into a star map big enough to cover the entire floorspace of the Library's observatory. Xadrez was having trouble getting his bearings, because quite a few distant suns were either devoured by cosmic monsters or sealed away behind Dyson spheres, or had been otherwise erased from local pseudo-linearity. The light pollution from the Silver City and the full moon weren't helping matters, either.

Kajura the Norn knocked at the trapdoor, then lifted it up anyway, slithering under the paper until she found an edge. She peered across the expanse of blackest vellum, flicking her eyelids at the once-general.

Wasn't there something else you were supposed to be doing, sighed Xadrez. The Norn just laughed her crystalline laugh, not bothering to ask him the same.

That the Place of all locales was
will be
the last stronghold against the human invasion baffles me
this cosmology laid out here a fine demonstration of how readily it entangles itself with other worlds

Explain to me this, Fate
how did this world survive through such gross embroilment with the rest of the multiverse
where mine, sequestered, shattered, fell apart with one lone stroke

She shimmered back under the map, hiss-humming to herself until she bumped into the Catastrologus proper. Your star?

My what

Your sun, sighed Kajura, jabbing one claw to a neatly-labelled star and another to its skybound counterpart. The pivot to your world's spinning, the satellite (parent)? The origin?

You mean the eye of Origin
don't you
But that hardly hangs in the sky like your violet fireball there for all and sundry to see
how would you even see it from Beyond with Her cloak surrounding it

Xadrez frowned, mentally grappling to imagine something he'd never imagined having to imagine. He made vague hand motions along the lines of some kind of hemisphere, looking more bewildered than actively frustrated.

How would you even
what would the Cloak look like from without

Kajura giggled. The trapdoor burst open.



The SunConverse Xodapop

was having real-people problems. Namely, a bad case of the still-existences, despite having filed all the requisite paperwork to check out a narratively-relative ages ago. His partner in the anarchist-surreal buddy cop rock opera that was his side of the story sensed his unease. It didn't approve of this altruism business, not even for the stability of wider existence. Especially for the stability of wider existence.

The percussion to Xodapop's bassline growled a protesting vibrato beneath his fingers on the fretboard, but the Time Shredder was already on the move.

As Xodapop arpeggio'd furiously through history and chord progressions, his sort-of promise to Kracht came to mind. His threat to go back and stop Emma hadn't been an idle one, but it really was a last resort. There was enough uncertainty in the future for his muse to convolute itself into the cracks of reality, but the past was iffy at best and a ten-cello pileup being scheduled every Sunday until the heats-death of the multiverse at worst.

As he approached his destination, something clashed like fuchsia and mauve, grabbing the Shredder by the source of his powers and doing something very unpleasant to it. Xodapop knew better than to stop playing, and crescendoed into existence right behind his green friend. Xadrez was up against the wall, disc akilter and bashing Kracht around the head with his chunkiest chess piece. Kracht had him pinned there by the Middle-Gem, punching the black disc like a prizefighter and getting increasingly pissed off (as opposed to bored or disillusioned) when it reacted completely unlike a fleshy biped to his blows.

The Norn in the corner immediately turned hostile, the more feminine aspects of its appearance rearranging into something primal and vicious. Her two sisters materialised in the tower, their hissing an invitation to leave that was almost as universal as the language of music. Almost.

"Steady on, cats and kitties," chuckled Xodapop. Xadrez stopped braining Kracht long enough for the latter to realise something was up.

"Who the fuck are you supposed to be?" yelled Kracht, still not quite willing to get off his machismo high that came from finally giving Xadrez what was coming to him. Converse beamed in a guileless way you couldn't practice.

"Kracht, my rockerfeller! Now, I'm gonna trust you to jive with this, but I'm a buddy of yours in a roundabout sort of way-"

Kracht bristled, still with a knee on Xadrez' chessboard, but a garbled shriek from Kajura's jaws drowned out whatever retort he had. The Norns had arranged themselves in a triangle, the threads of life they had been weaving extending like a net.

"Your patron threatens this world, wanderer
We will not abide its incursion
Say your piece and leave"

"Ladies, let me assure you that my 'piece' is long, riveting, and certainly not digestible in a single sitting. I can, however-" Xodapop hastened, when Peppi did something to her face that put all the teeth on the outside "-give you the sampler." He fiddled with his mechanical arm for a bit, until it spat out a Time Cop Regulation h-USB 32.0 drive. It was about the size of a thumbnail, and glinted in a way that Converse hoped wasn't menacing. "Now this, this is a data packet my friend Kracht needs-"

"I've never met you," snapped Kracht. Peppi lunged for the chip, Xodapop tossed it at Kracht, and Xadrez instinctively snatched it when Kracht gave insufficient fucks to try and catch it.

"-For the stability of wider reality! I beg of you!"

Kracht and Xadrez watched the Norns encircle, ensnare, and forcibly drag the Time Shredder with them out of existence. Xadrez, still with a fist in his throat and a knee at his chessboard, twirled the data stick in his fingertips.

---

Elsewhich in nowhere, time hiccoughed up a lung.

---

Ok, said Xadrez, to the fist and the knee and the rest of Kracht. I'll finally concede
you've dealt admirably with more than your fair share of the ridiculous on your journey
I'll still not redact the point that it's all your own d-

Kracht punched Xadrez across the face, which merely roiled and lost its shape a bit rather than breaking in any satisfying fashion.

"Stop talking like that," snarled Kracht. "And give me that!"

Xadrez did not give Kracht the Middle-Gem, but it wasn't like batting a ghostly hand across his features did all that much. Kracht tried to yank the gem with both hands out of Xadrez' chest. The tactician offered no resistance, and an overexerting Kracht landed on his chiselled backside and pulled Xadrez down with him.

The spirit leered, ineffectually pawing at the ineffectual green hands in his throat.

Would that I could, yet as best I discern you'd have to kill me for it
And I should think you have done quite enough of thugh-

Kracht, still prone, kicked him in the board.

Have you THUD taken complete leave THUD of your senses THUD
Kracht
This gem THUD and its bearer THUD are this dominion's hyper-literal THUD moral compass
What message does beating it out of me transmit
self-sworn protector of the Place

Kracht froze, then scrambled to his feet and seemed to collect himself. Xadrez unslouched, clutching a hand to his insubstantial cheek.

"I don't really care if you're - a real - the real Xadrez, some obnoxious cameo round version of him from someone else's battle, or you're something else borrowing his face." Kracht wasn't sure whether that hurt more to say, or to treat all of that as serious possibilities. "Whatever you are, I care more about protecting the Place from Cedric than you care about being a goddamn obstruction."

Oh please
it's not like you're a real battler
This is the endgame
the you that mattered was just a hanging pawn in a midgame exchange

Kracht creaked, like exactly half of him tried to tackle Xadrez then and there. "I killed you," he finally growled.

Xadrez tilted his head in his hand, brought the other to his elbow. Right
yes
you've only killed me and Jen and Arkal a functionally-infinite number of times there's no need to gloat

A chess piece flew through Xadrez' face, and cracked in two against the wall. Kracht was upon him in an instant, upon the board; one fist was clamped round the Middle-Gem and the other was punching, swiping, doing whatever he could to scatter the spectre.

"You fucking bastard! You fucker! You're the one that killed her!"

the first time? sure, why not
I don't doubt she got in the way of your survival many times after the fact though

The Middle-gem glowed warmth like a maladapted plug in a socket. Kracht lurched back to All-Stars Round 4 - Cryostasis Hangar 5. Even a copy could have her kindness, hide it under those same shrouds of scorn and teenage egocentricity. She'd told him, don't blame yourself for what happened. You were brave. By the sound of it, you've only gotten braver, and if you tell yourself otherwise you need to shut the hell up. Ok?

Ok. Xadrez was still dangling by the Gem, his outline scattered across half as much space as usual, the mist above his shoulders slowly coalescing back into infuriating apathy.

He didn't care. Kracht was trying to save the fucking multiverse and Xadrez had come crawling out of whatever afterlife he subscribed to, with no motive or allegiance beyond "fuck you, Kracht. Fuck you for killing me."

"Once," Kracht finally said to his feet. "I killed you once."

He looked up, to where Xadrez' eyes would be in a minute or two. "I don't get what you mean that I've killed you all those other times. Why would I do that? Why do you think I'd suffer through all that? Why would you think I could? I'm not brave or strong like Emma."

Emma's smile came to him in that moment, the genuine one that hid behind the wall of fire and lit up the world like a sun. Kracht slid off Xadrez' board, unclasped the Middle-Gem with a difficulty he'd sooner associate with muscle and bone.

"I don't know who had to kill you a thousand times, Xadrez. If it was me, I can't see how I'd ever enjoy it. You were cruel, sure, but more than that you were desperate."

There was enough of Xadrez again to actually look him in the face. It was to Kracht's incomprehension that Xadrez reflected that same emotion in his posture (which proved time and again more expressive than his face), the never-seen slack tension of utter bewilderment. It took one awkward second before Kracht followed his glance and picked up a stray chess piece.

Do you mean to tell me
you've never repeated the battle

Uh,

"Yeah?"

Never died
never been
or rather
are yet to be
thrown into a time loop that will force you to repeat our battle

Kracht didn't say anything, because he had no idea what Xadrez was talking about. The tactician reached for his shoulder, his fingers recoiling straight after like a guillotine had fallen before them.

I
I'm such an idiot
I have blundered
made a gross and unconscionable miscalculation

---

Elsewhen entirely, causality (analogously, Tia) downed time's (analogously, Converse's) lung with a satisfied snap of its jaws.

Kracht was moved, if not to pity, then to hesitation.

Xadrez had been his first evil mastermind, and really wasn’t much of one, compared to the entities the he’d had to deal with since. When the chessmaster had been capable of dealing any real damage, it was usually when faced with the defeat of his plans—placed in check, he’d always tried to flip the board. Now Kracht was seeing a different side of the tactician—a sorrow bordering on genuine humility.

Kracht tried to disarm the tension by focusing on the immediate problem presented them by their extratemporal benefactor. Holding up the h-USB drive: “There isn’t anywhere in the Place where we can plug this in.”

Xadrez continued to ignore Kracht, but at least began ignoring him out loud, which was a response, of sorts.

A novice mistake

This board that serves as my base my foundation might have served as a reminder but it was one I elected to ignore

A three dimensional game played along axes x y and t but one which is viewed by ignorant novices as being a two-dimensional game

In which the current configuration of pieces is to be taken as a discrete entity in which a given action can attain an absolute value

Where any player worth their salt understands that by moving along one’s queens and castles along t one may find checkmates and thence move backwards

And a true master understands the board as a superstructure in which past configurations are just as important as future configurations

My thinking has been determinedly linear

Worse, reactionary

Discrete actions within an artificially circumscribed horizon

”And if you’re done beating yourself up about it, your next move would be to help me figure out how to access this, right?”

Xadrez looked up from his nigh-empty board at Kracht and the drive in his hand. The Middle-Gem caught the moonlight and sparkled.

A glimpse of the superstructure

Yes

My current position on a six-or-seven-dimensional board gives me few opportunities beyond the acquisition of knowledge and perspective

A deliberate gambit on the part of our grandmalefactors to shunt us far out of the way of anywh

Hmm

Any spatiotemporal vantage from which we might gain any causal influence on the prologue of the risky narrative confluences of ‘final round’

”The way I see it,” interrupted Kracht, “We could easily hook this up to a computer in the Silver City, but that would give the Amalgam instant access to the same information I’m supposed to gain access to, which--”

Which would be an acceptable loss

Consider in light of the circumstances I’m sure you’re beginning to understand the fundamental limitations of a ‘four-dimensional entity’

Its conquest of an abortive multiverse a Pyrrhic victory at best

I acknowledge that showing the Ovoid the bars of its cage is not an ideal move and bears a slight risk of seeding consequences that could play out in the relevant timeline

(to wit the one without you in it)

However with endgame rapidly approaching it seems wiser to table all objectives other than the gathering of information in the hopes of intuiting a checkmate scenario in the next round

”Why should I care about a timeline without me in it?” demanded Kracht.

Xadrez appeared momentarily shocked.

I

I should probably be having more fun with this moment

Dispensing words of nemesisly wisdom to the one and only Teenage Kracht

Suffice to say that you die thinking of nothing else

The chessmaster allowed himself a small moment of glee at the rock’s wince.

Oh don’t worry

You live longer than most

”Look,” said Kracht, holding up the drive. “This thing was given to me, not you. I decide what to do with it. And I’m not going to put my multiverse at risk over whatever you’re planning at the other end of whatever wormhole you crawled out of. What we really need--”

You’re misremembering

Our messenger specifically stated that it was information you needed but he gave it to me

My suspicion is that he is in fact my own agent or soon will be

And that the data packet is my own instructions to each of us as to how to execute those aspects of my master plan that must go into action before I think of it

”That’s wishful thinking, isn’t it? He could just as easily be working against you.”

Xadrez wilted. Perhaps

But realizing one’s own wishes within a causal structure as complex as ours is largely a matter of determination

I play not only to win, but to have already won

Kracht sat down on a log. “Listen,” he said. “I think I get what you’re saying. But determination doesn’t mean anything if you’re acting like a reckless idiot. If we give this—whatever it is—if we give it over to the Amalgam, they’ll figure out what to do with it and find a way to use that information in every… timeline or possibility or whatever. That’s what it does. It expands. Continuously and always beyond its initial goals. The Hand of Silver started off trying to create a Type I civilization and is on the verge of achieving a Type VIII. If it figures out that you came out of somewhere beyond its influence, it’ll take that too and wind up as, I don’t know, a Type XI. What we need is to dig up a very powerful and versatile computer separate from the Silver City… or a Bio Wyrm.”

Inquisitively:

A bio wyrm

”Sure. We never figured this out in the initial battle, but Bio Wyrms aren’t parasites so much as they’re… librarians. They can digest and process any sort of information, genetic, linguistic, in some cases conceptual. Their homeworld was the third round of this battle—the Amalgam’s battle. Cedric killed them all, though. I’m sorry, are you laughing?”

Not quite, but the tactician was rippling slightly around his upper abdomen.

A bio wyrm

Of course

This is what happens when you stop planning ahead

Would you believe that I had two of them lying around and wound up losing them both

No matter but thank you for reminding me

Xadrez held the Middle-Gem up to the light.

I’m now a librarian of sorts as well

* * * * *

Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic mooooo- shliiiiick mrrrrrrrrrrurrrrr tic-tic-tic

Amalgam fragments do not eat meat. Nor, in fact, do they eat any organic matter. To take a non-human into one’s body is to become partly inhuman, which is unacceptable. To take a human into one’s body is cannibalism, which is slightly less efficient than simply harnessing the endless power of the Amalgam to do away with the metabolic process altogether.

Why, then, the slaughterhouse?

Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic mooooo- shliiiiick mrrrrrrrrrrurrrrr tic-tic-tic

Much like the fire hydrants filled with sand and the storefront window displays within which are only a sign saying “PLEASE REDIRECT YOUR ATTENTION TO THE ONCOMING PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC, CITIZEN,” the slaughterhouse seemed to have no functionality other than an atavistic twinge on the part of the Silver City itself. However, the same complaint might well have been lodged against the Amalgam’s continued employment of the human genome, although, of course, its employment of the human genome is its entire agenda. The four-dimensional grandentity’s endless fractal self-replication suggested, after all, that there was something worth replicating, some human X-factor worthy of preservation and propagation.

And so, in the past-future where meat was heretical, the venerable institution of the slaughterhouse remained intact.

Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic mooooo- shliiiiick mrrrrrrrrrrurrrrr tic-tic-tic

“Moo!”

Arkal covered his steed’s eyes, several moments too late. He, too, had spent his share of time watching the conveyer belts, the clamps, the blades, the troughs that collected the blood and sent it off elsewhere. The bizarre, meaningless efficiency of the Silver City. The craftsmanship of it.

Is this where it all ends, then?

For all that Arkal had seen in five rounds of battle, nothing before this had repelled him quite so much as this. All the horrors that he had witnessed, yet none had shown him so clearly the terrifying applications of his own work. This was the future, he could see it clearly—the design and construction of weapons not for heroes or even for men, but for purposes, for brute quantitative industry. The apotheosis and Luciferian fall of the blacksmith. The forging of hell.

Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic mooooo- shliiiiick mrrrrrrrrrrurrrrr tic-tic-tic

Arkal had himself killed his share of cattle in his day, but this disturbed him nearly as much as if it had been humans strung up by the ankles. Where were these cows even coming from? Where were they even going?

“Moo!”

Arkal’s cow shook her head violently until the smith removed his hand. “Oughtn’t we be getting on then?” he grunted.

“Moo!”

The cow tapped her hoof on the metal floor, which rung hollowly.

“Ah.” Arkal dismounted. The latch on the trapdoor was not particularly well hidden, but then again, he supposed that not a lot of people came to this place.

Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic

The light emanating from below was the faint cool blue of the full moon.

Shliiiiiiiiick

* * * * *

Six down.

The surface of the moon stained with beige blood and strewn with wires and broken glass. Jen, the once and maybe-just-maybe future queen, the hem of her battledress sashaying around her ankles in languorous gravity, was getting pretty good at disarming these things. A three step process of hitting, cutting and ripping, potentially not without the risk of thermonarrative obliteration.

She was settling into a rhythm. Dancing across the room (6700 miles in circumference) in order to lock arms with her intended partner. Each successive craterportation could be the one that brought her to the decisive battle she finally felt herself to be ready for.

A few more Amalganauts dead at the end of the beige blade. It had taken her a few massacres to quite get the hang of Arkal’s masterpiece—the Amalgam-sword was every sword, and exhibited the properties of each based on the 4-D angle at which she swung. Hit, cut, rip. Seven bombs disarmed. All the while dogged by the black bird Memory. A running monologue of her past mistakes, defeats, outright follies. Dredging up the most vulnerable parts of her. She supposed it was meant to be therapeutic.

Jen was tired.

She lay down in the nearest crater and, with a shloop, found herself back in the kitchen. A cup of tea simmered askance on the counter. Welcome back dear

“Hey. Six bombs left.” Jen grabbed the tea and gulped it aggressively, burning her tongue. It was revoltingly sweet. Muninn fluttered. “Could you get me back out there?”

Now now there’s no need to hurry stay and chat with your celestial mother for a while

Sugar, caffeine, and maternal affection lit off fireworks in Jen’s head. She was having difficulty concentrating. “Mom, I’ll take a break when the battle’s over. Until then—“

Come now you’re almost halfway there and there’s no need to put all that responsibility on your thin little shoulders

The smells of Thanksgiving drifting in from everywhere. Red wine, light cigarettes and menopause. Jen coughed. Muninn flew up to the chandelier, squawking excitedly. “Mom, I need to do this. I’m doing this for you.. So Cedric doesn’t—“

Don’t give me that claptrap Jen don’t act like I don’t know you you’re just planning on running off again so soon

Please stay with me dear relax take a bath we can go shopping for back-to-school suppl—

“Okay, you got me.” Jen stood up, weakly. “If I have to run away, I’ll run away. Okay?”

Well I won’t stop you but it’s a dangerous world out there Jen you never know what could happen

“I can take care of myself, Mom,” snapped Jen. The smells turned from fall to winter. Hot chocolate and fire on the wood stove. Peppermint, weed and Fabreze from upstairs. Jen took a deep breath. “Craterport engage.”

Shloop

”Such hostility. You never could bear anyone looking after you,” chided Muninn.

Jen emerged in an unfamiliar crater. On the dark side of Mother Moon, now. “I don’t need protecting.”

”Beg to differ, girl,” growled Cedric from the lip of the crater, leaning up against a moonbomb.

The rank biological stench of the Amalgam fragments and the smell of burning. At once Jen felt very far from home.

"Well, thanks for everything. I don't suppose you've got any advice to impart before I head down there?"

"Moo."

"Hmm. Wow, I'll have to think about that one for a bit." Arkal glanced down at the glowing hole. "When I have some more time, anyways. So, uh, what about advice for dealing with this prophet?"

"Moo!"

"It was a riddle? Well, why don't you just tell me what it means instead of getting all clever about it?"

"Moo."

"Oh. Rules of the trial, huh. Fair enough. All right, wish me luck, I'm going in."

"Moo!"

The cow turned, and fled the slaughterhouse. Now alone, Arkal leapt down the hole and landed on the moon.

It was a good deal smaller than he expected, just barely enough to hold his weight. Down below, he saw the Place, and outside its borders lay a dozen or so large piles of materials, and a few half-finished projects.

This was a craftsman's workshop, Arkal realized. The moon, and the land below, were a model. And in the middle of it all, an enormous stick was moving mountains.

"I can't assemble them just yet, I'm not done adjusting the model!"

The stick was also talking to itself.

"Yes, I know the model will be irrelevant in a few hours, all the more reason to finish it now! Besides, it's the only way I can properly test the launch angles."

The stick suddenly stopped pushing the mountain.

"Oh. Yes, I suppose that would work."

The stick began clicking excitedly as it turned away and walked towards a gleaming pile of scrap metal. Arkal immediately recognized it all as silver.

"What? I slipped into clicking? You didn't miss anything, I was just talking to myself. Yes, I know insect communication is inherently inferior, but until you take care of the moon you're going to have to put up with it. Now be quiet, I've got work to do."

The stick-creature dove into the pile of silver, and in seconds, a strange machine stood in place of the pile. The stick was standing beside a needlessly dramatic lever, rubbing its forelimbs together in glee.

"It is finished! Prepare to be amazed by Klaus Gepetrovich's latest wonder!"

Klaus clicked angrily.

"Of course you can be amazed without actually seeing it! Fine, fine, I'll turn it on now."

Klaus pulled the lever, and the machine made an assortment of mechanical noises before spitting out two man-sized silver figurines.

They looked like soldiers, and indeed, marched forward like soldiers. A few moments later, they were joined by an identical pair, then another, then another.

Klaus stood before them, and pointed at the model.

"This is my greatest work. Destroy it."

The silver soldiers obeyed, and pounded the mountains back into diamond, tore up the blue and green felt of the land and rivers, stomped towns underfoot, knocked down forests, and began stacking themselves up to reach the moon once everything else was torn down.

"Enough!" Klaus said. "The moon is fine. Those of you made from the left side, line up against the left wall. Those of you made from the right side, line up against the right wall. I'll send you off in just a moment."

The soldiers obediently began lining up, and continued to do so as they poured out of the machine. Klaus' attention wasn't on them, however; instead, he was working on reassembling the model.

It took him less than a minute to rearrange it all.

"There!" he said, sounding pleased. "The model is accurate, and the troops are ready to go... what? Commanders? Specific models? Ugh, fine, I'll put them together."

Klaus dove into another pile of silver, and this time emerged with just two more figurines. They were not dressed like soldiers, and carried no weapons; in fact, they looked like an ordinary man and woman.

"Wait, you want a third? Fine, fine, you two go and lead the left group. Start marching, everything's set up now."

The two figurines saluted, and walked over to the front of the line on the left wall. Then they marched right into the wall ahead of them, and vanished.

The line of soldiers behind them soon followed, and Arkal suddenly heard a strange noise.

He glanced below at the model. Tiny silver figurines were being flung through the air towards... a flying whale?

"There! Done!"

Arkal turned his eyes back towards Klaus. The third figurine was finished, and it was wearing an unpleasantly familiar suit of full-body armor. Arkal couldn't contain his rage at the sight.

"REINHARDT!"

Arkal leapt off the moon towards the silver figure of Reinhardt, knocking it to the floor. When he saw it unbroken, he picked it up and tried to smash the stick-thing with it.

The stick leapt back, surprised.

"Who are you? What are you doing? No, not you, there's an intruder in my workshop! I'll call you back later!"

"Do you have any idea what kind of monster you've made?" Arkal howled, flinging the silver Reinhardt at his foe. "Do you know what this man did, what he was proud of doing?"

"Not especially," the stick said, stepping aside. Reinhardt flew past him, and tore a gaping hole into the machine. "It was the Amalgam's request that I design a soldier who looked like him. They didn't go into detail about who he was."

Klaus hopped towards the machine and pulled Silver Reinhardt out. Somehow, he managed to fix the hole by the time his creation was free.

Silver Reinhardt faced Arkal and raised its sword.

"No need for that, child. Uncle Klaus can take care of himself. You have a Middle-Gem to steal, remember?"

Obediently, Silver Reinhardt marched over towards the right wall. Arkal was about to chase him, but Klaus ordered some soldiers to surround the smith.

They didn't last long, but they gave Reinhardt time to reach the wall. The soldiers started marching through after him, and before long, the model showed them flying through the air to the top of a mass of mountains.

Arkal had no idea what the soldiers were doing. He only knew that they had to be stopped. But he'd seen that Klaus could repair the machine in seconds. The stick would have to be dealt with first if Arkal was going to do anything more than slow the things down.

Just as he reached that conclusion, Arkal heard the familiar sounds of a craftsman at work behind him.

And they ended distressingly fast.

****

"You may be on to something," Kracht said. "Concepts often matter more than physical realities here in the Place. The idea of a library and the idea of a computer have a lot of similarities. We just need to work out how to bridge the gap."

the most straightforward way to proceed is this

we are using the library as a metaphor for a computer

so we extend that metaphor as far as we can

"You mean, treat the library as a literal computer?"

precisely

admittedly, I am somewhat out of my element here

the only computer I have seen was the one in Alpha Complex

but you, even before experiencing countless timelines, have seen more worlds than I

surely you have some knowledge

how would we access this data with a computer

"Well, they have slots built into them. You'd shove that into a slot, and the computer could access the files on it."

that seems simple enough to translate

Xadrez floated over to a bookshelf, and removed a small tome. He then placed the drive on the shelf.

Suddenly, the shelf tossed it back at him. The words "INSUFFICIENT MEMORY" flashed through his mind

I believe we are on the right track

the Library rejected it, but told me why

"insufficient memory"

"I think it's because what you did amounted, metaphorically, to trying to put the data directly on the drive," Kracht mused. "If that thing really has countless timelines' worth of memories, there must be an enormous amount of data on it. The Library doesn't have the capacity for it, not with all the books already on its shelves."

so we must either give the library more space

or clear up more of the space already in it

"We could clear the shelves, but there's no guarantee even that would be enough. Otherwise... I suppose we could build an extension?"

Xadrez was already knocking books to the floor.

I have neither the time nor the patience for construction

unless you would like to build an extension out of these books

or have a faster suggestion

Kracht glanced at the conch-phone.

"Well... the King could decree another building to be part of the Library. Preferably one with a lot of empty shelves, since I think that's the approximate representation of memory here."

then call him

I doubt he would care to talk to me again

or even consider my request

"I don't really know him that well, but I suppose it's worth a try."

Kracht picked up the phone and waited, as Xadrez knocked over another shelf of books.

"No answer."

Xadrez was about to respond, but his thought-words went unspoken as a man in heavy silver armor burst through the Library's roof and fell on a pile of books.

"I am Vandrel Reinhardt, the greatest human warlord to ever live!" the armor declared. "I claim the Middle-Gem for the human race!"

"Reinhardt died long ago," Kracht said. "This must be some sort of construct sent by the Amalgam."

such an inconvenience

can you deal with him yourself, or must I delay this work

Before Kracht could answer, a dozen silver soldiers fell through the hole in the roof.

"I think I'm going to need a little help, yeah," he said. "You know, if you're not too busy."

***

"I would have thought they'd do something by now," Hector mumbled. "I mean, I've showered, gotten dressed, eaten breakfast... or some meal, at least. Even if they were holding off for common courtesy, you'd think they'd have sent some assassins by now." He glanced hopefully at Emma. "Unless you stopped them before they even got close and didn't tell me about it?"

She shook her head.

"No assassins, I'm afraid."

"This isn't looking like much of a crisis point, then."

"It appears the other two tasks are higher priority," Huginn thought-said. "That suggests their capabilities in the Place are limited, at least for now."

"Then we should strike back instead of just waiting," Hector said. "If they don't have the humanpower to go for me and the moon and the Middle-Gem at the same time, they can't have that much in the way of defenses."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps they believe that defending the Silver City is more important than an offensive strike right now."

"If that's true, then they must think we have a chance of actually destroying it. Sounds like all the more reason to try."

"You would expose yourself to danger, my King. This is ill-advised."

"Is it? If Emma is one of three heroes, like you said, then we need her where the action is. And that's clearly not here..."

At that moment, the phone rang.

"I guess I'd better get that," Hector sighed.

Just as he stood up, there was a sound behind him. It sounded exactly like two man-sized chunks of silver striking whale blubber. Hector turned around, and saw two figurines picking themselves up from the floor.

"Sorry about that!" the male figurine said. "We didn't mean to disturb your conversation, we're just here to kill King Hector."

"Honey, really, you don't have to be so tactless about it," the woman said.

"Well, if this is the best Hoss can spare, I guess I don't have much to worry about. Sorry we put you to all this trouble for nothing, Emma..."

His voice trailed off as he saw the shock in Emma's eyes.

"Those are my parents," she said.

"Yes, Emma, and we have to say we're very disappointed in you," the silver Mr. Broderburg continued.

"But really, all you have to do is kill King Hector here and join the Amalgam, and we can forgive you," said Mrs. Broderburg.

There were a few more splats as a group of silver soldiers landed behind the pair.

"Or at least, stay out of the way of our troops," Mr. Broderburg said. "We're sure you've had a very rough childhood growing up without us, but trust us, everything will be fine once the King is dead and humanity reigns across the entire multiverse."

The phone stopped ringing.

***

It took Jen a moment to realize that the burning was coming from the stream of flame Cedric's sword was spewing at her. She leapt out of the way, and the blast struck the bottom of the crater instead.

"Looks like I'm not craterporting out if things get rough," Jen sighed, looking at the blaze.

"You can't escape, girl!" Cedric shouted. He thrust his sword forward and a fireball flew out from its tip.

Jen leapt to the side as the fireball struck the spot she had been standing in a moment ago. Now it was just flames.

"It doesn't matter how many times I miss," Cedric sneered, throwing another fireball. "Before long, there won't be anywhere for you to stand."

"Good point," Jen said. "I guess I can't just dodge forever."

She swung the Amalgam-blade as a sword of crystalline ice, and sliced through the incoming fireball. It turned to steam, giving her a brief chance to catch her breath.

She noticed that Cedric hadn't moved an inch from his post. If she could move him, either by force or by goading him away, she might be able to take care of the bomb, at least.

She wondered if she had a really powerful magnetic sword somewhere in her blade's infinite repertoire, but her thought was interrupted by a memory.


"Silver isn't drawn to magnets," it said."Not more than non-metals are, anyway."

"Thanks, science class," Jen grumbled, slicing through another fireball. "I don't suppose I paid enough attention to remember any properties of silver that might be useful here?"

"It's good at conducting heat and electricity," Muninn replied. "That's all I can find, I'm much better with traumatic or disappointing personal experiences than facts."

"Judging by how much this guy likes fire, heat's probably out. Maybe I can find a thunder sword."

Jen slashed at another fireball. At least Cedric wasn't coming up with any new tricks.

"You'd want lightning, not thunder. Thunder's just the noise, lightning is the actual electricity."

"Shut up, science class. I'm trying to look through an infinite number of swords right now."

"I know. Who do you think is keeping track of the ones you've already checked?"

"Found one!"

Jen slashed through the next fireball, and quickly made her next swing. A thunderbolt - or lightning bolt, as science class was rudely reminding her - shot out of the blade directly towards Cedric. At the speed it was moving, and with all the highly-conductive silver on him, he had no chance to dodge.

The bolt surged through him, and he grimaced in pain for a moment. But after that, he resumed his usual arrogance.

"I almost felt that!" he laughed. "Got anything better for me?"

There was a crackling sound behind him. He didn't care.

It didn't even bother him much when the bomb exploded from the sudden electrical charge.

The architecture was... unnerving. There was nothing explicitly dangerous about this dimension, but little cues and clues filtered through its bizarre appearance and let your subconscious know you weren't welcome. The work of dead empires, it spelled itself out to her in beige and blue like black and white.

Nothing immediately presented itself as the obvious answer to her questions, so for a while she simply watched the inhabitants. Survivors. Shards of shards, tossed on sparse stages and reflecting the emptiness within their fragments-of-selves. She watched them struggle with what they were, how that compared to what they were supposed to replicate. It depressed her.

There'd been a round here, of what she could only assume was the Observer's battle. A closer look at the corpse leaking sluggishly out of every nook in the reality confirmed as such, and she almost smiled. Had he learnt nothing from his dealings with the Faceless?

Why here, though? Why not skip the prelude, the suspense, and just give her the coordinates to the current round? To the Observer?

Most of the cameos below busied themselves with what she could only assume were the usual tasks for the natives of a Battle-injected world. She glanced back through time and space to nine worlds - seven, deserted; one, a shell of a world packed with simulacra, a lively locale for as long as there were real entities to appreciate it; one, a home to thousands. Not in the past, not until recently. Right now.

A home to thousands, dragged from orbit.

...

Scout sighed. She wanted this diversion over and done with.

---

Xadrez tried praying. Nothing too wheedly and desparate, more of a celestial sounding board to see who might be listening.

The gods responded in bet-hedging turn - to wit, they didn't. That was ok. Xadrez could work with that. He could through the Middle-Gem already feel the Library's subtle transition from isolated peak to the top of the world, and he could work with that too. He ignored Kracht and the silver soldiers for the moment, attuning himself to the Middle-Gem's pulse and getting reacquainted with his chessboard. It was obtuse without his pieces, clumsy work without his knife, and the cubic-crystal silver frost that rimmed the board rang - rang in a way dulled his hands to the wrist when his fingers strayed too close. Xadrez grimaced. It was restricting his workspace, and whatever resigned-fey mood he'd tapped into when he'd initiated the first paradigm shift wasn't coming back to him.

Reinhardt: Reinhardter stopped trying to kill the unliving entity which was Kracht, shoved him aside, and seized the Middle-Gem with no resistance. Xadrez just kind of dangled, calm in the knowledge the Amalgam's forces hadn't been prepared to deal with two precision-carved rocks and a ghost.

"Hand over the Middle-Gem," intoned the silver warlord. The spectral one rolled his eyes even as Reinhardt ran him through with a sword, and beckoned to the Catastrologus, which they'd all just kind of left lying around. The centrefold yanked itself from under the feet of every man-shaped thing still standing, robbing Reinhardt of his footing and sending discarded books flying. The Catastrologus flew to Xadrez' hand even as the rest of him slammed the board (dragged down by Reinhardter). Xadrez adjusted his grip, twisted as best he could to make the most of momentum, then squarely jammed the tome in the warlord's metalloid face.

It crumpled. Xadrez forced his fingers in, and opened the book a crack.

Reinhardt's head split open as the centrefold forcibly unpacked itself, a midnight torrent of angles and stars heralded by still-rippling thunder. The figurine shrieked (in a satisfyingly muffled fashion). He released the Middle-Gem, and Xadrez pulled out his sword and tossed it to Kracht.

Kracht was about to warn Xadrez that these silver men weren't typical fleshy Amalgam-arms, and by dint of being solid mineral they were actually offering a decent fight. On clockwork cue, two more crashed through the observatory roof, but failed to stick the landing. One cannoned through the trapdoor, turning it to splinters, and Xadrez spun sharply at the noise. He swiftly analysed the other, took in the sparking joints and the writhing iron limbs and the storm seen swirling through the holes in the roof.

The storm from nowhere, singing the song of souls - a tempestuous testament to the deaths of men.

This was his battle, he'd staked his claim, declared he cared for the Library. The Middle-Gem. The final bastion of inhumanity.

He was battling for the Place, and through the Middle-Gem, it knew.

---

Jen was knocked off her feet by the blast, and rolled more by accident into the remnants of a crater as the other five bombs went off. The moon just shook and improbably rained flaming rubble on her for a few minutes, though one of her more insociable force-broadswords (appelation: Thrummagem) was shielding her from the worst of it. She waited for the eerie silence to settle in, but the tremors and deep cracking noises pressed on.

She finally chanced a look over the crater rim, and saw stars and a dizzying not-drop into an infinite void. Yanking her gaze from that, the obnoxious raven and the marignally more obnoxious Cedric weren't in the immediate vicinity. Good. Jen dusted off her battledress as best she could, and stood-

-and almost lifted herself off her feet. The gravity had changed, for the significantly smaller celestial body. Not good. She didn't have far to run before the Place swung into view below. She jammed her omnisword (a snippy, whippy rapier) into the ground for support, trying to focus on standing relative to the ground and not at the perpendicular Place.

The moon spread dismayingly outward, the explosions having split it into half a dozen sizeable rocks that were definitely falling, albeit slowly. Jen, fighting initial panic at the sight, could smell magic, or the smell given to magic so you knew it was leaking. She probed the cliff with her sword, then scuttled over the edge and found gravity shifting. Cedric stood some way off, wreathed in blooms of explosion and incinerating what could only have been the remnants of Luna Lane, exposed by the satellite-splitting detonation. Jen could forgive herself for not being blind-furious, because with the Place hunkered in the sky above nausea was a fair bit easier. The twist in her gut inconveniently reminded her to look up, where the other pieces of the moon were drifting with stately deadliness down and away. She could probably jump up, fall, and spring off those and maybe take Cedric by surprise, but one such strike was unlikely to down him.

A ceremonial claymore piped up, which startled Jen considering the two hadn't spoken in years. Star Canise reminded the queen he had perfectly servicable moonrock trim, and if Mother Moon's magic needed a place to hide until things calmed down a bit, well, he'd be more than happy to oblige. Presuming, you understand, that her former majesty can kill this blazing moron. Jen was about to argue against siphoning Mother Moon into what was still technically a sword made of Amalgam, but Star Canise's snotty attitude was coming back to her. She brought the sword down at the familiar, stilted angle, remembering in a single stroke the pomp and choking circumstance and two diplomatic disputes sandwiching one righteously trashed pagoda. The bad old days, before Jen decreed that things would stop making so much sense.

The moon (all its constituent pieces) rang, a single, sharp note the colour of royalty. The wind didn't pick up around Jen, not in a position to exist in space, but moonsong swirled around her in a vortex nonetheless. Cedric's aura of fire sputtered, drained of fuel. He turned in the direction his dying flames flickered, and his grin followed suit. He pulled the last of traces of explosion onto his sword, and Jen hefted her own crackling sword with difficulty. If any sword could store an abstract force of nature like Mother Moon, it would be Jen's, but the magical feedback was already getting tangled up in her psyche. A wholly unfamiliar maternal instinct was definitely worming its way in there, and it was all Jen could do to channel it into something more constructive like, say, the instinct to rip apart whatever was threatening her cubs. Country. Yeah, that'd do.

The once-queen bared her teeth, and charged. Mom hummed approvingly in the back of her mind, and blanketed her in light as Cedric launched a wave of fire. Jen pierced it like a moonbeam. Their two swords crashed like cymbals, the Place creeping a little closer from below with every strike.

---

Arkal lowered his Stuff-sword, which was only getting heavier the more mooks he had to carve through. He needed a fresh plan of attack. He clambered atop the nearest pile of silver soldiers and roared at the phasmid.

"Klaus! Stop this madness."

The stick insect just clicked and hissed in response, his machine spitting out another file of soldiers.

"What happens to you when the Amalgam's plan is complete?"

"I crumble in humanity's grip, traitor!" shrieked Klaus.

Arkal smashed a soldier's face in with a well-placed mace. The grunts had him surrounded on his corps-pile, so he leapt to the base of the recently-constructed diamond spire. The senselessness of everything in the cultist's lair just made him angry. This model he and the silver troops fought across was beautiful, the work of a master craftsman. Arkal snapped off a mountain peak like an icicle and jammed it through a spearman.

This stick-insect cared about its craft, and used it unthinkingly to such terrible ends. Why?

The mountain-spiked spearman lurched over and tackled Arkal as he sidestepped another's sword, and the two of them came crashing down on a strip mall. Klaus hissed with frustration, but didn't move from beside the machine spitting out soldiers. Arkal's forge blocked a sword, but the smith snapped out of it at the clang and knocked the offending swordsman's silver feet out from under him. He got to his feet a little slower, using the diamond mountain and its library to help himself up.

"Klaus, listen to me! Not as a human, but as a craftsman!"

The phasmid flinched, another phalanx stepping in front of him to stop Arkal. Klaus lowered his tools and blinked.

"I just need to understand. You're clearly proud of your creations, and very skilled. So, why do you help the Amalgam when it'd destroy all your beautiful work?"

Klaus had almost looked interested, but his antennae drooped and he turned back to the piles of scrap.

"No, no," he wheezed. "You cannot understand, you are a traitor to your own kind and never heard the Song. I was human once, yes, yes I was. I heard the Amalgam's Song, I heard its song and it rejected me, drew out my inhumanity and warped me." Klaus motioned his guards to charge, already finishing another. "You cannot have heard it, heard the Song, else you would have accepted the Amalgam unconditionally!"

Arkal sighed, punching and mowing his way through the throng again until he could talk to Klaus again comparatively unimpeded . "Are you sure we heard the same thing!? Because I did hear it, and well, I couldn't say I didn't think it was nice -"

"NICE!?" Klaus click-shrieked, bugging eyes only exacerbated by his condition. "The Amalgam's Song was the creation of all humanity! To hear it is to weep and know that no creation, in all the Multiverse, will ever compare!"

Arkal lopped a soldier's head clean off, and kicked the torso over. "Right, we definitely didn't hear the same thing. Because, Klaus, I found it rather inspiring. Inspiring enough to forge the greatest work in all my years as a smith."

Klaus twitched his mandibles, exuding not-quite pine scented irritation. Arkal felt sure he'd gotten through to him, but the toymaker jerkily shook his head and reattached a soldier's arm.

"Keh! Such words only exalt the Amalgam. Of course, of course the Song would inspire you, a human! Even a traitrous human, yes! It rewrote your traitor-thoughts into patterns beyond our comprehension, wrote in you, a great smith, instructions for a weapon befitting humanity's champion! You must have, must have forged a blade that could hunt every last traitor, slay any beast, fell any monster-"

Arkal pulled out Weo's scythe, clearing the room with a roar of fire. "Almost, Klaus." He leapt upon the Chairman's Hill, brandishing an invisible rapier of Stuff.

"I used the Song, and I made it into a sword. That sword slayed the Ovoid itself! Amalgam." Arkal frowned. "Whatever. Jen - maybe you've met her, she was the one who killed it."

The stick insect wrung his hands. His breathing sounded close to fitful, and Arkal could almost see the conenctions in his brain missing their destinations.

"No. No, no no. No. You lie! No one man, no one human could do it. The Amalgam's Song is perfection! The, the culmination of humanity itself! Yes! To turn, to turn it into a sword, to dare improve on perfection - that is beyond blasphemy! Beyond blasphemy, beyond treason, it's impossible!"

The soldiers lowered their swords at their maker's screams, before returning to his side to protect him. The machine still clanged and whirred and spat out silver men unbidden, and when Klaus finally found his voice it chattered and clicked and stunk of fear and anger.

"You liar, yes, liar, you claim you made perfection sharper, lighter, stronger, you claim you mastered forged the Song - you, you!"

Klaus hissed, clutching his tools like a child with its blanket, immune to reason that the monsters weren't real and those square inches of flannel weren't protecting you from shit.

"YOU WILL NOT LEAVE THIS PLACE ALIVE!"

---

The stormclouds parted for just long enough to let what was left of the moon glint through, before another semi-electrocuted soldier broke what was left of the roof. Xadrez deliberated for a bit, then started dragging dismembered dolls aside to get at the trapdoor. Instructing Kracht to continue repelling them, he fumbled his way down the ladder and drifted as urgently as he was capable back to the sitting room. Other than a whole lot of Undercurrent splashed all over the place and a trail of foot-shaped prints leading to the tower room, things had been left mostly undisturbed.

Xadrez picked up a remnant ream of something tidily combining the physical properties of silk and fog, trying to make heads or tails of it. Tracing one particular thread to one end of the ribbon led him to Tia, the eldest of the Norns. She looked a little bit queasy teal, but still pulled a stern enough expression that even Xadrez quailed.

I don't suppose you interrogated that
whatever it was

Tia just flicked her crests, divesting Xadrez of her weftwork and growling a slow, judgemental death-rattle.

Fine
the short of it is that the rock you dredged up has what should have been a premediated appointment
I have due concern however that my incursion was not
and that the prescribed series of events has not accounted for this
At any rate this device- Xadrez opened his fist, half-expecting the Norn to dispose of it swiftly as she did Converse -has information intended for Kracht
Weighing the risks and merits of following the intruder's instructions would be easier if I knew even some of this machine's contents

The Norn glanced up at the ceiling, at the maltreated Catastrologous in the tactician's off hand. She tutted, or at least clicked her teeth in a fair approximation.

The Librarian's pelt is a poor fit for you, Once-General
You're much a beast after your mistress
One of life's catabolists, an un-doer

You cannot think I'd not resent that, said Xadrez, eyes narrowed, Middle-Gem buzzing. Tia blinked reproachfully, swaddling herself in fatesilk. She pushed her hair behind an ear-antler with a claw, dislodging the purple flower nestled there.

I did not dismiss your position within some vaunted construct of
order, nor,
did I call you destruction
Order has its ends, Once-General
A name and place to such ends does not absolve them

Kajura flopped from the ceiling, chattering at her sister and licking blood off her eyelids. Should such ends ever absolution seek!

Indeed, snickered Tia, not taking her eyes off Xadrez.
A Librarian does not pursue knowledge,
they accrue it,
sort it,
lay it out in its vestements
for a true hero's perusal

You are no Librarian, Once-General
Let me be clear on that

You
seem to know much of this fabled beast, said Xadrez. His fingers closed around the chip, hestitated, before he leant forward and proferred it. Peppi, the Dredge Norn, materialised grinning, her hands around the tactician's. She took the chip, flitted back to her cauldron, and tossed it in. The gunmetal sea vanished, replaced with the not-colour of Time Itself. Peppi, already elbow-deep in anticipation, looked to Tia for an order.

Where to begin?

Tia looked to Xadrez, who looked to the Middle-Gem. Crux and crutch and cirumstance.

wherever Fates lead, he smiled. Peppi's claw arced through the air, trailing promise like glitter.

---

Hector grabbed Emma by the shoulder, a peacock with abjuring runes where its eyespots should be leaping into existence between them and the silver Broderburgs. "Get a grip," he hissed at her. The ugly squawk of a peafowl getting its bearings snapped her out of it, and she took a stumbling step forward.

Hector watched as time crashed to a halt, before realising that time had just floored the brakes and was proceeding at a crawl. Emma fell to one knee, breath ragged. She stood at pained leisure, and there was a panic in her eyes that suggested to Hector a trap by the Amalgam's forces. Then she turned to him with the same look, and it was clearly confusion. Unfamiliarity.

Memories caught up in hops, skips, and mental leaps. Emma smiled at the king, and only winced a litle. Were Hector better-versed in the fundamentals of magic, he might've recognised a transaction at work, a freshly-warped reality's kickback upon metabolism and psyche. In Emma's case, to her chronology on top of that.

"It's a temporal bubble - while we're in it we're faster, so the world runs slower. An old soldier friend taught me this trick."

The change in Emma's demeanour was jarring. There was a hint of pride to her voice, like nobody had been expecting her to come up with a solution, and yet, here we were. Hector almost asked her if she was really all right, when she noticed (for the first time, again) the silver soldiers. She watched the hypnotic-slow flourish of anger on her parents' chrome faces, and looked to Hector more confused than anything.

"They aren't my parents," decided Emma. "Allie said they had to leave, find a place we could all hide-" -time took a choked breath- "- but let's face it. They're dead." She blinked, and was much more like herself again (from Hector's limited experience). "Right. The rate those soldiers are flying in, they'll have us surrounded in no time. Have you got any artillery?"

Hector pondered, then snapped his fingers. "Archer fish." A squad of what were definitely too big and too muscly-armed to be real archer fish appeared, before hitting the ground with a series of wet "fwip"s. Emma watched them flop about silently, before Hector muttered, "fish eagles. Porcupines." The flying steeds and their back-mounted ammo materialised, picked up the fish, and stood to attention.

"We'll need a mount of our own, too. Something fast and untrackable, preferably."

"Excuse me? There's no way we're leaving the whale."

"Why not?"

Hector racked his brains. "Fuck. I can't remember."

Emma rolled her eyes. The peacock, by the edge of the time bubble, honked uncertainly as the soldiers advanced. "The throne room may be a more defensible position than your bedchamber, my liege," counselled Huginn.

"The throne room," Hector mumbled. He extricated another zebra and a cavalcade of spitting cobras, then pulled Emma aboard and drew his sword. Huginn perched on the zebra's hindquarters, and Tom Broderburg's sword was moving in an incremental overhead swinging motion toward the barrier's edge.

Emma finished coughing, and undid the barrier with zero fanfare. There was an indignant bray, a clang, and a mystical thrumming as the peacock dodged a sword and activated its eyespots in quick succession. The zebra leapt into motion, trampling a soldier and making for the exit.

"Emma, honey, come back!" cried Clarice, as she strangled a peacock with her bare hands.

"Listen to your mother when she's speaking to you," scolded Tom. Hector just supported Emma, close as she was to passing out and falling off the zebra. The Chromeburg flung his sword, missing the king but impaling in the doorway with a squelch. Pain, or at least the concept of it, flashed through Hector's head.

"Shit." He tossed gold-leafcutter ants like confetti as he ran, hoping they could digest at least some of the silver and stitch the whale back together. Another half-dozen soldiers fell into the fray - six dull thumps in the pit of Hector's stomach.

---

Scout heard reality, or rather, the dead Ovoid intertwined in it, yielding and breaking as an amateur mage negotiated a portal out of it. The Observer clearly hadn't tidied up after his last round, which was the same breed of chicanery that gave rise to problems like the Amalgam. Or so Scout suspected. Figuring at least some obligation as a denizen of the Multiverse, if not to irresponsible Grandmasters, she swooped off her perch to assess the situation.

Kath was marching double-time along a snaking branch, wide as a road and ensconced with new growth that received many a defoliating whip when the path became overgrown. The day was looking salvagable until the spring green turned spearmint, and the temperature dropped too fast for the Tree to actually muster a response along the lines of dying. Kath whirled around, and caught a glimpse of something in the guise of a woman before the air froze around her.

Kath screamed profanity as best she could with her jaw locked, before the frigid bitch tilted her head a little and silenced her.

"You're not from any battle I've seen." Scout's tone was distinctly incurious. "Who are you? What were you doing in that city? Why are you leaving?"

A bright green flame rushed through Kath- "that's none of your damn business" -she snarled, and pounced through the thawed-out air. Her whip bit the woman's cheek, failing to draw blood but making the should've-been-a-cut issue curls of mist, vaguely reminicent of Xadrez.

"It is my business, insofar as I'll bury you under the roots of this tree if I believe you are any credible threat to me or my interests." Scout's voice struck a perfect accord between exaggerated boredom and legitimate supreme indifference, and Kath despite herself admired it. "That city was the site of a Battle, and such locales normally restrict interdimensional travel." She paused. "That is not to say your incursion violates our rules; in fact, if I deem you and your goals no threat to the Battles' integrity, you may go."

Kath had no way to tell if this ice queen would kill her anyway, so settled for the truth. "I'm not in one of those fight things," she growled. "There was one passed through the dive I used to live in, but after that I headed me own way. There was this place called, well, the Place, and I was supposed to be queen of it, but the stupid leggers kept wanting their old queen back. I figured I'd be better off killing her than killing all the dissidents, so I chased her to back there." Kath, to her surprise and loathing for this woman, had no problem jamming a thumb the way she'd come. "I cut a deal with the guy who's going to command my army or what have you, and the two disappeared when that beige thing died, but I've just got to go kill me some Grandmasters and the ghost's mine by contract."

Scout raised an eyebrow, or at least ended up in a state with one raised eyebrow. "You're going to 'kill some Grandmasters.'"

"Once you unmount your high marlin and send me on my way, yeah."

You couldn't really tell with her eyes pure white, but Scout gave the mermaid a long look up and down, choosing her words. "You."

"It's not like I've got else better to do! Xadrez being a stubborn fool who won't serve me until the lot of them're dead."

Kath felt the ambient temperature drop another couple of degrees. She wondered if being deep-frozen was going to be her punishment for taking the direct approach, but Scout eventually settled for "Xadrez." It was almost a question.

"Yeah. Xadrez."

"Spectral entity. Humanoid. Bound to a large black disc, carries a knife. Master tactician. A warlord. Circumstances unknown following the death and banishment, respectively, of the two chief gods of his world." Kath, through the rising voice of Scout, would've claimed most of that sounded about right, less the bits where she had no idea, but the World Tree swayed as if in a storm. She couldn't move. Leaves cracked and fell, a shower of glass fragments splintering and ringing off the branches and slicing at the mermaid's skin like Scout's cry. The goddess laughed, a noise as colourless as her distintegrating form - only grief gave it the faintest tint.

"The Observer! Has stolen Xadrez! From a world sealed against me! Oh, how the Agents of this outer Hell conspire!"

The cold rushed from the air, whirling into a focus upon which the storm of spirits alighted. Scout composed herself again from the shoal, and the single point of utter cold stretched into a thin-lipped smile.

"My thanks, little godslayer." Scout stepped aside, imperceptibly inclining her head. "You're free to leave." Kath found that, indeed, she was, and had the good sense not to waste it arguing with an chaotic ghost-storm. She ran from winter, ran until the Tree returned to spring.

---

Cedric was winning, to the surprise of basically nobody in the extant multiverse. Jen barely rolled out of the way of the train-rocket, which Cedric had dragged up and launched into a recuperating Jen just to be a douchebag about it. Jen's moon magic could only help so much - siphoning it off the moon itself for safekeeping was no good if she burnt it all trying to take Cedric down anyway. A full-frontal assault was also out, considering her bloody mother would happily use the last of her strength to shield Jen from a fireball or a nasty cut or even a bit of glare in her eyes.

She checked in with Star Canise, did some likely-inaccurate mental arithmetic, before rushing forward and dancing again through fire like it was all choreographed. She'd tried half a dozen swords, and none seemed to truly equal Cedir'c Silver Sword.

A scrap of something black sailed past her shoulder, screeching and latching onto the omniknight's face. Jen took the lapse to retreat a step. Muninn cawwed and clawed and the tang of burnt feathers contaminated the air, another dose of dizzy to the upside-down world. By the time Cedric had gotten a hand round its neck and set the raven alight, Jen had found the Impossible Blade again. Tabbing once over to Star Canise for the necessary boost of speed and a curt farewell, Jen charged.

Her blade charged clear through armour and ribs. Cedric didn't sputter, though his infernal halo obliged. The ex-queen got another physics-defying slash across Cedric's back before he staggered around. He managed two steps before the smell of blood rose from his insides, and pain finally overcame hyperhuman drive. Cedric raised his arms, grimacing, Muninn in one fist and his sword in the other.

Jen wondered for a split second if he raised those hands in surrender, when Cedric's expression twisted. He slammed Muninn's remains on the ground and brought down his sword with both arms and the last of his strength.

Muninn buckled, and seemed to swallow the Silver Sword right to the hilt, which released one final ring of fire, big and flashy and more for show than to actively incinerate. Cedric didn't have the strength to look at Jen, much less stand, but he hauled his head up at least on the cue of a mechanical glunk as the hilt hit rock.

No one-liner. Just a look of abject hatred, and yawning cracks radiating from the sword in the stone, splitting what remained unsplit again and again until the entire third of a moon was swiftly reduced to gravel. Jen didn't have a chance to leap so much as gravity stopped working, "the moon underfoot" falling apart. The Place, neglected all this time, claimed her and what was left of the Moon as its own badly-displaced landstuff.

Jen enjoyed about half a minute of weightlessness, of the silence of space and a dying Cedric, before she could feel the headfirst Placeward creep. The moonrocks and moongravel and ruined trainrocket joined her in descent, a stately drift that couldn't last forever.

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

Any number of devices could have stepped out of the scrap pile. Arkal had already seen Klaus' skill at work, his sheer imagination. There was no way to predict what he would make next.

But had Arkal made the effort, he would not have guessed that the toymaker's next creation would have been a mass of metal in the shape of a little old man with a walking stick.

"TRAITOR", the metal Klaus said, waving its stick in as menacing a way as it could. "TRAITOR!"

It was pathetic to see. The old fool wanted his humanity so desperately that he had created a mockery of it. Arkal sighed, and raised his hammer. There was little to do but put the poor thing out of its misery.

Yet before he could, the Klausbot had rushed behind him and whacked him in the knees with its stick.

"Damn, that thing moves fast!" Arkal said. "Men, seize it!"

The toy soldiers were confused at first, but ultimately they decided that it was easiest to follow an order, any order. They marched towards the Klausbot in formation.

But as each one drew near, the toymaker ripped it apart in seconds, the clockwerk ticking with every blow.

"Fall back!" Arkal shouted. But it was too late - in moments, the army was disassembled, and the metal Klaus' stick was now an enormous drill created from the remnants of its enemies.

"TRAITOR," it said, turning back to Arkal.

"Don't you know any other words?" Arkal asked, just as he put the finishing touches on a catapult and loaded a model mountain. He launched it straight at the mechanical toymaker - only to have its drill smash through the piece and craft a statue of a man on a horse.

Arkal suspected that the real Klaus was within the machine, directing its actions - but the machine could craft faster than a man, and the clockwerk granted it even more advantage.

Meanwhile, Kracht was watching nervously from behind the fallen moonrock. He wanted to lend his aid, but he also knew well what that drill could do to him.

On the other hand, as he saw the Klausbot advance on the old smith, it struck him that the machine could probably do even worse things to Arkal.

But much to his surprise, the drill stopped an inch short of Arkal, seemingly stopped by nothing at all.

Indeed, Arkal chuckled a little as he watched the machine fail to drill through the shield of Stuff. Klaus couldn't tell the Stuff was there, leaving his machine completely unable to craft with it.

But that still left the problem of actually smashing the thing. Arkal had to hold the shield steady with both hands to keep it working, which left him unable to grab one of his Stuff weapons to deal the final blow.

Kracht granted him that chance. The green man had no more idea than the Klausbot of Stuff's existence, but he could tell that Arkal was playing defense. Kracht tore a chunk off the moon and flung it at the machine, and it began to turn around.

Arkal saw his chance. He let go of the shield, and pulled out a club of Stuff. With a swift blow, he struck the Klausbot in the head, crushing it under the immense weight he couldn't feel.

The robot dropped its drill, and its hands frantically moved towards its head, rebuilding it. Arkal crushed it again, giving Kracht time to march over and pick up the drill-cane. He turned the device on its master, tearing the Klausbot into bits, aided by Arkal refashioning key components into a halberd.

As the mechanical Klaus fell to bits on the ground, however, one thing became clear - the real Klaus was nowhere inside.

His whereabouts became much clearer as the ground beneath them began to shake, clearer still as the stars in the sky above seemed to become brighter.

The workshop had taken flight.

---

Muninn remembered dying.

He remembered the pain of being crushed by Cedric's hand, of the fire that engulfed him, of being discarded and, ironically, forgotten.

For the first time in his short period of corporeality, the raven's only memories were his own. And they were, by and large, unpleasant.

To Hector, he had been nothing more than a container, a tool at best. And to Jen, he had primarily been a nuisance, a reminder of everything she wanted to forget.

Now he was just a dead raven. He might have enjoyed the freedom if he were still alive and mobile.

Instead, he could do nothing but remember. He couldn't even observe events as they happened, only find himself with a memory after the fact.

He could remember the explosion, remember plummeting through the sky, remember being swallowed by an enormous purple whale.

The last thing he would remember was King Hector's voice.

"Oh shit. Can we fix this?"

---

"I believe it would be better to delay debate on this matter until we the throne room, sire," Huginn said. "Although it does appear that the enemy's numbers are thinning."

"Throne room," Hector repeated. "That's... which way is that from the throat? I used to know this."

"Up," Emma sighed. "Your throne is on the brains. You told me that two minutes ago."

"Sorry, my memory's a little fried right now," Hector said, pointing to the saliva-covered bird in his hand. "I'll need you and Huginn to do the thinking until I can, uh, what were we talking about again?"

Emma said nothing. She merely kicked the nearest soldier down the throat, and as it rolled down the sloped pathway it knocked over its allies, creating a heap at the bottom.

Hector coughed.

Emma cast a time distortion on the heap of soldiers, and their efforts to pick themselves up slowed to a crawl.

"That should buy us time," she said, grabbing Hector by the arm. "Hopefully enough to make you functional again."

By the time they reached the base of the skull, Hector was having trouble remembering his own name. By the time they were in the throne room itself, he had forgotten how to string syllables together.

"Guh... duh? Buh," Hector said, waving vaguely at the whale's smaller brain. Emma carried him over to the throne, where he sat down and placed Muninn in his lap.

Huginn looked over the burned body of his brother sadly.

"We must halt the decline in Muninn's condition," he said.

"Uh," Hector probably agreed.

"I thought he was already dead."

"Dead, but not powerless. If we could prevent him from further decay, we might have a chance to stabilize Hector's memory with minimal damage."

Emma touched Muninn's body lightly. Her parents - her real parents - would have scolded her for touching a dead animal, didn't she know they were filthy and diseased and what was that beautiful light wait was the bird moving?

It was. Muninn groaned, and so did Hector as he started to gradually recall that particular combinations of sounds could form meaningful linguistic concepts, also known as "words".

"Ma-ma," Hector muttered. "Hec-tor." He looked down at his surroundings. "Buh-rain? Guh-ross."

"I should probably get back in there, shouldn't I," the newly-arisen Muninn said. "Get him back up to speed faster."

"That is highly advisable, yes," Huginn said. "I will join you shortly after. He will need his full mental capacity soon."

Muninn limped his way up to Hector's shoulder, walked towards his head, and vanished.

"We're, under attack," he muttered. "Thanks... Emma? Em-ma. Emma."

A few moments of analysis later, Huginn concluded it was safe to return, and Hector began to feel smarter.

Smart enough to realize what the sharp sensation of pain near his heart meant when everything started to shake.

"Fuck! Something's hit the whale!"

---

There was a barrier around the outer edges of the Place, a barrier that crossed the borders of its universe.

The Amalgam, always taking the long view while also being highly impatient, was not deterred by the barrier. It simply flung fragments into it constantly; the barrier would then change them into petunias or goats or other such hideous nonhumans, and the Amalgam would restore them to their proper human glory before throwing them at the barrier again.

Even so, the barrier hardly weakened. This was because it was powered by King Hector of the Place, and he had a telepathic whale palace to use as a conduit between himself and the Place. When the barrier started to fall, Hector could strengthen it with a thought, no matter where he was. And so the barrier held firm, despite the constant assault.

Or rather, it held firm until the sharp prow of Klaus' newly-launched workship struck the whale in the heart.

At that moment, the Amalgam hurled its fragments at the barrier once more. As before, many were transformed into nonhumans.

But this time, the barrier buckled. And a few fragments, a fraction of a percentage, made it through unchanged.

And a fraction of a percentage of trillions of fragments was still enough for a sizable invasion force.

The blast took out the lights, but Xadrez' robes gave off enough to see. "There you are," said Kracht, running to embrace Emma.

"Kracht," breathed Emma, weakly. "Is the light back? I can't... Kracht, can you see me?"

The mineral waved his hand in front of Emma's eyes. Xadrez waved a hand above a train of fabric, glancing up at the remains of a candelebra-shaped glow-worm city.

"No," whispered Kracht, not catching Xadrez' echo. "No, no, Emma, honey, I'm sorry." The lights aren't on "You're just blind, is all."

Xadrez looked to the doorway, and Emma just smiled. That way she always smiles.

Silence. The tactician's fingers drummed on the board, toyed with loose fibres,failed to escape Kracht's notice. Kracht looked at the doorway, look at Xadrez. "You know something."

Don't mind me, mumbled the spirit, clearly distracted. its just one of those situations
where one thing
inevitably
leads to a mother

"Mommy's here?" asked Emma. "My mommy works for the newspaper."

"Xadrez," snarled Kracht, gripping Emma's shoulder, "what the fuck are you playing at?"

Release the girl, Kracht came a voice. Xadrez was shaking. You know what your alien radiation is doing to her

Kracht knows. He'll turn to look at her, staring off into space. His presence was undoing would undo what constant time manipulation had wrought, reverting her to the child she'd been when she'd entered her first battle.

Xadrez twitched irritably, the motion amplified through the golden threads and the whale-cave's shadows wavering in turn. Kracht, spat Xadrez, a breaking of his voice like the cracking of eons-spanning stone.

It's the end of the line
the end of the round
you

I

we are going to settle this
the three of us

no

wait
no

Xadrez sounded close to panicky, glancing again and again at the doorway, wringing his robes like cornered kings. Emma's breathing was a soft, arrhythmic rasp, scratching at the edges of the two entities' hearing. Kracht stared in incomprehension; the tactician was searching, stalling, refusing to look at him.

"Is someone there?"

"Sweetie, stay with me," said Kracht, kissing Emma on the forehead, glaring at the ghost. "Xadrez, you need to leave."

Xadrez shook his head, traced the green-gold thread with his right hand, from the thumb, up the wrist, to the aureate tangle at his breast. He studied it intently, before closing the gap and extending a hand. It wavered over Emma's shoulder, afraid one touch would shatter everything. The spirit recoiled, averted his gaze again to his chessboard. He spoke more to the marbled silver stain that encircled the disc, watching its prickling progress.

I do not intend to stay long
nor did I intend to have to waylay you both in this fashion

this is all excruciatingly inauspicious and certainly
certainly not the way things were supposed to be
but here we are
free of distractions

it
it seems a good a time as any to tell you both a story

"A story sounds nice," Emma murmured into Kracht's chest, jamming protestations in his lime green throat.

---

Jen couldn't bring herself to care about how Xadrez was going to wrangle Cedric; it'd taken most of her patience for his aggrandising bullshit to find out from him where Arkal was, find out he wasn't going to not be a cryptic ass about that, and reach a compromise and make tracks for the whale. She carried the dead moon's light on the edge of her sword, bathing the woods in silver and attracting many a confused small bird trying to flee by her compass glow.

If any of the old guard crossed paths with Jen now, they'd think her some spectre of the past, flitting through the Grove like one of its million memories. Skulking around someone else's Place, on some other dead asshole's orders. Something - the whale, she guessed - moaned a sad song to the Place, the only one who'd listen but never really love back such fleeting, dying things like the whale or Jen. For a heartbeat, she missed Cedric and all the fuck-introspection violence his presence entailed.

Jen sniffed, spat out something phlegmy and purple (damn haylcyon-fever) and broke cover, dashing unchallenged into the Palace Gardens and murmuring a thanks to the Grove for carrying her there quickly. The whale loomed up ahead, floating low in the shadow of the spire Xadrez had twisted out of the landscape. Its one visible eye rolled down to study Jen, nothing to offer but solemn communion. The once-queen tromped up the steps, into the shadow of the behemoth, which spasmed with pain as a thunk-crash rang from on high. With a groan, the whale's jaws opened, admitting her into what seemed more or less a regular palace interior.

Glancing back at the view from the top of the palace steps (pretty decent, naturally), the ugly orange of light pollution harked from beyond the trees like a forest fire. Somewhere beyond that, beige cracks were hairlining across the sky, weeping a fraction of trillions of Amalgamites.

An ambergris chandelier trembled overhead. Jen found the biggest, fanciest flight of stairs she could and took them on up, following her nose and taking a few inspired-if-familiar back passageways, until one of the doors she kicked open greeted her with the throne room. She tried not to think about the weird floor texture (was that a brain?); luckily, some girl who was probably Emma, damnit, was holding down the main stairwell, up which a steady flow of clockwork soldiers marched. Hector was on the edge of his throne, concentrating on something that wasn't in the room itself.

Jen whipped her sword, now a rapier, like a conductor's baton, slamming the soldiers with a wave of moonsong. Their metal hulls warped and buckled as a dose of concentrated therianthropy wracked their forms, warping hands to hooves and giving a rather ragged Emma a breather. "Nice of you to help," Jen quipped at the King, who roused himself with a gasp from his minke-syncing.

"The Ovoid broke the Place's defences. With the moon gone and the Middle-Gem gods know where, we'll be overrun within the hour." He didn't seem completely broken by the intel, which was a good start. Jen, impending reset be damned, decided to be helpful.

"Actually, I've got your moon here, and Xadrez has the Middle-Gem. We can still pull this off. Pull something off."

The king paused midway to explaining why that wouldn't work, got distracted by Emma's situation and roused up some swans for backup, before looking at Jen a bit more carefully. He didn't look so hot, himself.

"Right, fine. We'll deal with that after that treasonous werestick."

"Klaus? Neither you or Kath thought to get rid of him?"

"You're the one who left him alive and exiled for Kath to get her hooks into," snapped Hector, realising with a stabbing in his side this was all beside the point. "Whatever, look. I'm dead weight in a fight as long as my whale's bleeding out a fresh hole in its chest."

Jen nodded. She'd just have to spot Kracht before Xadrez did; figure out with him how best to fuck over Xadrez, the Ovoid, the Observer, and anyone else who thought they could push her around; let things flow from there. Emma had cleared the last of the clockwork soldiers, and after a bout of nasty coughing ran over to check on Hector.

"Thanks," she said to Jen, beaming in a way that would've been beatific. Her tone was sisterly, though Jen didn't really have that facet register on any conscious level. More distracting was the woman's manaburn symptoms, in Jen's professional magic-wielder's opinion, the king should've noticed and been worried about quite some time ago. She tried and failed to shove the concern aside; she had enough on her plate. Emma herself clearly didn't need anyone fussing over her; she was getting an update on the situation outside from the King.

"Stay on the brain," Emma ordered, "the two of us will handle Klaus."

Hector could only nod and recline on his throne, gritting his teeth. Jen had a moment's deliberation to postpone the whole "following orders" embargo, before chasing Emma down the stairs. "Hey! Emma Brodeburg, right?"

"Hey. Didn't the King guy say you were dead?"

Jen made a noise she hoped was nonchalant. "That'll be Queen Jen the First, thanks." Emma hid a smile, slicing a twitching Silver Soldier apart and kicking his arm clean off. "I think I talked to your sister, once."

There was a whirring and a ticking clashing coming from the bottom of the stairs. Emma flickered, or her magical signature did. Recollection was a hazardous hobby for an avatar of Time. She coughed, and didn't stop coughing for a good minute or more. "We haven't talked in ages," she eventually rasped. "Allie had to leave once I could look after myself."

Shit. Jen was struggling to not feel pity, in spite of her instinctive mistrust of women like Emma Brodeburg (and a general something about Emma in particular which demanded you save your pity in the first place). She got waylaid into a thorny patch of Xadrez-wrangling, trying to figure out whether she was (by the tactician's calculations) supposed to inform Emma right now or not, when the Workship almost fried her and Emma with a lightning turret affixed to the prow. The prow itself (the non-tip bit that wasn't impaled clean through the floor) was unfolding into a thousand whirring arms and teeth and knives, trying to chew/drag the Workshop's way into the royal bedchamber. There were dead animals and ripped-up toy soldiers and the place stunk like an inspiringly-badly seasoned steak.

Arkal punched his way out of the workship hull with a gauntlet that wasn't there. To Jen's relief, his cuts looked superficial; Kracht and the surviving toy soldiers tumbled out after him. Arkal wasted no time kicking aside a rug and putting his tools down, a carved-off chunk of the Clockwerk (despite all sense, Tick!) resting atop the forge.

"We'll talk (and Tock!) and work, lass. What's to report?" Jen passed her Ovoid-sword to Arkal without complaint, receiving a (Tick!) substitute in the interim.

"Everything's turning to shit, and Xadrez wants you dead before those guys-" Jen did her damnedest to not act like Emma and Kracht's reunion was a tangible step to getting her life back "-fuck up their lives forever."

Arkal returned the Omnisword. "So that's Emma Brodeburg? I don't suppose we should tell them what's in store?"

"I don't know," admitted Jen, pulling a face. "Xadrez stole someone's cheat sheet, and was pretty insistent we had to let this play out."

---

"I won't do it," Jen repeated. "You're lying about-"

Jen couldn't finish that. Xadrez, blank eyes blazing, had plucked at a green-gold thread on his wrist, pulling it tight enough to curl the attached finger.

I do not lie to my soldiers, Jen
Ive sufficed two wars and a worlds end without resorting to untruths and I see no intention of starting
It is out of respect for you you petulant child that you are told what must be done and not a grocery list of happenstances to eventuate some design I keep locked in my mind

Jen looked about ready to argue, but the ghost the Librarian the General the Tactician raised a finger so she knew he wasn't finished. His eyes narrowed, a fake-and-deliberate soft surprise as he analysed Jen.

You think me petty
you think that I do not consider his premature death in this insidious tournament unconscionable
Well
I do not lie when I say there is no higher judgement
none to absolve me of the million slaughters
each terrible and necessary to see the Grandmasters fall
for such a judgement would've curtailed all this from the beginning

So call me cruel, call me a monster, a war criminal
once you do what I've commanded of you, I would owe you that much
But do not suggest again I would order lives ended without good reason

Xadrez sighed, shook out his sleeves. Cedric groaned and spat out a bit of beard-soot, and Xadrez glanced down at him and away from Jen with something that might've been relief.

Ill give you this decision to make
You can ensure by your own hand Arkal dies with dignity
or you can attempt to talk sense into your beaten dog here
or
inevtiably failing diplomacy with the knight
you could terrorise Emma and Kracht yourself
be the one to set him off on his circuitous demise

The tactician waited a moment, tugged at some strings, and unsteadily lifted up Cedric by the scruff of his neck. Hearing no intelligble protest from anyone, he dragged the knight up until his knees stopped scraping the ground and nodded to Jen.

I will handle the loop, then
inform you as required on developments
you have your orders
and I promise you a reckoning once this is done
if you insist it cannot wait until after the Grandmasters are dead
then next round

Xadrez dragged Cedric toward the pool with a cautious flick of his fingers, dropped him face-first with much less care. He studied the colouds of ash and tendrils of blood as they leaked into the pool, back turned to Jen.

Say your piece
But please then go get on with it

"You're going to tell him what's in store. You owe him that much."

Gold sleeves, shimmer chartreuse. There are risks associated with altering too much of the events or the Kracht which lead circuitous to our prime timeline
For this our first foray into non-linear time we had best be content with gathering information
though such an event is beyond my current projections if the opportunity arises again we might-

"You don't know that we can't change things for the better here, right now."

Cedric had managed to haul up his front half long enough to gasp for air. The spirit flicked the knight onto his back, traced the warp of his golden robes, and shook his head.

I am being permissibly cautious
there are too many unknowns at stake
The Fates handed me not three
not six
but an irksomely indivisible multitude of threads

"You're an asshole, Xadrez. A petty, spiteful asshole."

And until you kill Arkal, I am my only authority
if you wish to squander the final round styling yourself as my arbiter
if you wish to mete out unto me judgement
if you think the Grandmasters can wait

Well

To say 'I cannot stop you' is a lie
But then and only then can I not stop you from trying

---

Kracht had a bad feeling about this. Relieved as he was to find Emma, protective as he was of her (he was her rock in every sense of the word, after all), he hurt her just be being present. Her condition had only deteriorated, and Kracht wasn't sure (didn't want to be sure) that their next parting would be their last. He couldn't send her alone to fight probably-Klaus and possibly-Cedric down in the basement where the whale's heart lay.

He didn't want to be alone.

The whale thrashed in pain, its size translating the motion into something more like being momentarily tossed onto a stormy boat. Kracht felt a pair of lowercase-g grandmasterly eyes on the back of his neck, and saw Xadrez quietly luminescing at the top of a flight of stairs. He was expressionless right until he opened his mouth, which let a sneer mingle on in there.

She is in no state to fight whatever lies down there

Another heave of the whale. Emma almost lost her footing; Kracht had to grab her shoulders.

She needs to rest
Cedric is coming

"How-"

I have it on good authority

Kracht's thoughts kept on roiling for a bit after the whale stopped. He turned to Emma, who was looking disorientedly up at Xadrez. Kracht tried not to let the worry show in his voice.

"Emma, you go ahead, ok? I'll be right behind you."

Emma snapped back to the now, blinked a few times. There were black spots spreading in her vision. "Sure." Kracht waited until she was out of earshot, before looking back up at Xadrez.

"Is this the part where it-"

Where what
You need not concern yourself with the specifics
But if it puts you at ease
no man or man-comprised aberration lays a hand on Emma
That much I'll promise you

Now go

---

"... And then what?"

And then
Cedric barges through that door
and Emma-

Kracht flinched as the Librarian spun about, glaring at her. Xadrez' tone had had that standoffish chill Kracht hadn't heard since the start of their first battle together, a silent sneer as it told the story like such intimate details had no frank and brazen place hung out in the open. Kracht would've shut him up well before this point, but Emma seemed content in the mineral's embrace.

She has the opportunity to fix everything
She alone has power to rival to undo the Amalgam
But she entrusts that task to you, Kracht
and through that blunder I, circuitous, arise

"Wait, so, you are from the future, even though-"

Yes Scout's mercy yes snarled Xadrez, jabbing a claw at Emma. Kracht took a step back, Emma mumbling a protest, arms weakly clinging round his waist.
this girl sends you back to the beginning of our battle and you try you to save the multiverse because of her idiot hero complex and how she bequeathed it to you
that converse imbecile from the library you meet him- a finger raised in Kracht's face, a thread exposed, fraying into a gossamer cloud- and a million others and too often you somehow pull it off
you somehow save the multiverse but it doesn't matter it never matters and it's all because of her
It's only when the observer intervenes only in the loop I'm in that you finally die and your horrible existence-to-be is finally validated
And I hate it
I hate everything about it

Xadrez flicked at Emma's shoulder, Kracht's free arm shoving through the tactician's face. why would you do this
what in all the hells made you think this was a good idea
that Kracht deserved this
that your friend deserved this
Origin wept the longer I think on this the worse you look, girl

Kracht pulled away. "That's. Enough," he said to Xadrez, as the whale juddered and rained rubble. He shielded Emma from the shards of chandelier, gently lifting her head from his chest once the coast was clear. "Oh, honey-"

It is not
It will not be enough until she understands the consequences of her fool endeavour
I have this single chance to make something of this
of us
we three can orchestrate a path here and now to the grandmasters demise-

"Xadrez, please."

The way he said it (barely audible) didn't make Xadrez stop, nor was it any coercion on Emma's part.

There was blood on his chest, little black stains on the green.

Her nose was bleeding. Her tear ducts, her gums, under all her fingernails, bleeding. Her hands slipped off from around Kracht, hung limply until he lowered the rest of her to the floor. Kracht crouched by her side, kissed her forehead, whispered "I'm sorry, god, no-"

no

"No," murmured Emma. The sound froze the two in place; the light from Xadrez' robes shimmered on the walls like an ocean. Emma laughed.

"Don't worry be sorry. We did great, Kracht."

Kracht raised one frail and bloodied hand, clasped within his. He knew exactly what was coming next. Xadrez mistook the not-rhythm of the Ovoid pounding at the edges of reality for blood in his ears, at disjointed crashing odds with the thrum of the Middle-Gem. This wasn't happening. This never should've happened didn't happen he wasn't struck fucking dumb again as his everything fractured-

Emma Brodeburg just

stopped breathing.

Chased by the beige crackle of an inelegantly showy round transition, the death itself was rather underwhelming.

Had he still possessed the anatomy for it, Xadrez might've thrown up. The Middle-Gem, placid and inert as Emma's body just discarded there, stabbed in his chest like a heart attack.

It was nearly over.

The Amalgam would soon control the Place, one of the last bastions of resistance in the multiverse. After the final round, there would be no serious opposition.

There was just one problem. Their champion was not at full strength. In Cedric's current state, Kracht might win, and that indignity was unacceptable. Only a human, no, only the champion of humanity could win the battle to end all battles.

And so the final round had to wait until Cedric was restored. A minor delay.

It would be taken care of even before the Place fell.

---

what do I do now

what can I do now

she's dead, he's gone, everything is over

It was hardly the first time one of Xadrez' plans had failed, though it might technically have been depending on how you handled the chronology. But before, there had always been some possibility of a backup plan.

What was there now? Even ignoring the issue of the memories, there was no Kracht to send back. He was in the grip of the Amalgam, and no doubt it was already sending him off to his doom.

Silver soldiers burst into the room. Xadrez hardly even cared. It was all a foregone conclusion now. He could stand and fight, or he could let them finish him off and have the worthless gem burning a hole in his chest. What did it even matter now?

One of the soldiers drew near, and Xadrez made no move.

Until, that is, the thing was close enough that a well-timed swing of his disc sent it flying against the wall, where it shattered into pieces.

It was the Amalgam's fault Kracht had been here in the first place. The Amalgam was the whole problem Kracht had been sent back to fix. If not for the Amalgam, Xadrez never would have had to deal with the damned rock's tricks in the first place.

He floated out of the room, swatting away soldiers as they came. If he could accomplish nothing else, he would at least make the Amalgam's existence miserable.

---

Jen was getting tired. The workship was churning out soldiers at a rate slightly slower than she could kill them; the difference was barely enough to let her catch her breath.

"How's it coming along, Arkal?" she asked, swinging the Omnisword again.

"Moonlight's tough to work with," the smith sighed. He glanced at the poor chunk of moonrock on his anvil, trying to hold up a long chain of light on its own. "I can do it, but it's slow, even with this doohickey (tick!) helping out. My hammer's not up to it."

"So make a better hammer," Jen said, gasping as she stabbed another three soldiers. "Here, use this."

She handed the Omnisword back to him. He glanced up at her.

"You sure?"

"I can hold out for a bit with the other sword," she said. "Just work fast." (tock!)

With the Clockwerk's aid, it was the work of a moment to turn the sword of all swords into the hammer of all hammers. Every hammer wielded by every smith was now at Arkal's command, ready to craft the greatest weapon of all time.

He was ready.

As they fled the workship, Kracht had told him of the silver sword. A blade forged from his own anvil, the power of creation flowed through it and it made new weapons with every blow. Cedric had wielded it as the Amalgam's champion, leaving much destruction in his wake. It was a mockery of everything Arkal stood for.

And now he was going to recreate it.

Arkal donned his Stuff-gauntlet, and reached into the depths of his forge. Residual heat wouldn't do for this task, he knew - he needed the stone itself.

Even through the Stuff, Arkal felt the intense heat against his palm. Nonetheless, he worked. He held the forgestone up to the anvil, and began reshaping anvil and moonlight with his hammer.

Under normal circumstances, the task would have taken days of effort. Even with the clockwerk alone, he would have expected an hour of work. But aided by the Omnihammer, he was done within a second. His anvil and the moon were now one within a sword.

"Got the base done," he said.

"Great. Can you give it here? I could use something a bit better."

Arkal pulled the silvermoon sword up from the floor, groaning as he did.

"It's pretty heavy," he said. "I think the moonrock's doing that."

Jen took the blade. Arkal wasn't kidding. She could barely lift it, but she could manage. With a single swing, she struck a silver soldier. He fell to pieces, and then the silver rose from the ground as a wolf. It promptly leapt at another soldier and tore its former comrade apart.

"Reinforcements," Jen said. "That's handy. Worth lugging a little extra weight around. Now let's take care of Klaus. He's somewhere in that airship, right?"

"Probably. Something's operating it, at least, and I can't see where else he'd be."

Jen stepped out of the chamber. Arkal grabbed his forge and the clockwerk before following. Jen struck the workship, and a portion tore off, taking the shape of a monkey. It didn't last, though; in a flash, the silver monkey was torn apart and the hole was fixed up.

"That'll be Klaus at work," Arkal said. "I think we're going to need a little more help to stop him. Guess it's time for the next step in the process."

Jen handed him the silvermoon sword, and fended off the workship's various tools with her other blade.

Arkal took the sword, and held the clockwerk against the silvermoon blade. Carefully, he built it in, without damaging the inner workings.

A small knife dropped to the floor when he was finished. Then another. Then ten more.

"Seems to be doing quantity over quality," he grumbled. "Might be good enough to outwork Klaus, though."

The sword seemed to have grown even heavier. Arkal was worried; it wasn't quite done yet, he could tell, and the new additions would make it heavier still. Nonetheless, it would probably work for the moment. He swung it at the workship...

And the weapon slipped out of his hands. The workship started crumbling, all its pieces adding themselves to the blade.

"Dammit!" Arkal howled. "The moon's not enough. That thing's got too much human-influence, and if it absorbs the whole ship that'll throw the balance off even more."

"I could try to get you more moon," Jen said. "I don't know how long it's going to take..."

"That's not quite it. It needs something more... lively."

Arkal suddenly looked at the walls around him, and realized what he needed to do.

"Get everyone out of here!" he shouted. "I've got work to do, and I'm going to need the whole whale to do it!"

---

Hector wasn't doing too well. He was barely holding off the soldiers with the creatures he summoned, and the workship wasn't likely to tire out before he did. And if the whale gave out first, that would only make it worse.

Suddenly, the flow of soldiers stopped. Hector breathed a sigh of relief as a zebra trampled the last pair. They might just survive long enough to come up with a completely futile plan before the Amalgam overran the Place.

Jen ran in a moment later.

"Arkal says we've got to get out," she said. "I'm running to the tail to warn Xadrez, I'm pretty sure he's got the others with him."

Hector groaned.

"The whale won't last long if I'm gone," he said. "Not that it has that much time to begin with."

"Just give yourself a pegasus or something in... two minutes or so, then? Look, Arkal's the expert on this stuff. I don't know exactly what he's planning, but I'm willing to leave it up to him."

"Fine," Hector sighed. He was too tired for a full pegasus, but he was able to grow some wings on the zebra. "I hope he knows what he's doing."

---

Though still convinced that nothing he did could be at all useful at this point, Xadrez nonetheless found meaningless violence quite therapeutic.

He'd fought his way down a few corridors when he noticed an open door saying "MEMORIAL HALL". He probably wouldn't have given it a second thought if he weren't looking for cover from the next wave.

He floated into the door, and the first thing that caught his eye was a familiar knife on a stand. A plaque under it read

IN MEMORY OF GENERAL XADREZ

Good Riddance, You Bastard

A moment later, the knife was taken from the stand, and the plaque sliced into pieces.

it still works

how fortunate

Xadrez turned towards the silver soldiers pouring in through the door. The knife sliced through them effortlessly.

As futile gestures went, it was remarkably satisfying. Xadrez floated out, only to find - to his disappointment, surprisingly - that there was no next wave.

There was only Jen.

"Xadrez! Where are Kracht and Emma? We have to get off this whale!"

Emma is dead, Kracht is gone

not in the way I intended

the round has moved on and Kracht is still in this timeline

we failed Jen

I failed

Jen wasn't sure how she felt. On the one hand, she wanted to tell Xadrez he deserved it for being such a smug, self-satisfied asshole; on the other hand, Kracht was in trouble, Emma was dead (Jen hadn't liked her but still), the Place was screwed, and their original timeline was even more screwed.

She settled on a reply of "Well, shit."

---

As it turned out, Arkal's plan was working, though you wouldn't know it to look at him.

He was wrestling with the silvermoonclock sword, which was still grabbing pieces from the workship. He had it pinned to the floor and was having trouble keeping it down.

But he didn't need to keep it down for long. Just long enough to melt it in the right spot with the forgestone and strike it with his hammer.

The silver melted onto the spot, binding the sword to the whale. Both sword and whale shook violently, but as the whale's life force began to flow through the blade, it grew calmer.

Arkal let out a sigh of relief. It wasn't going to be easy to finish the job, but at least he'd be safe.

He stepped on a familiar insect that had leapt off from the collapsing workship, then rushed up to the throne room.

It wasn't going to be easy to surgically embed a live whale and an airship into a blade while also keeping it at a reasonable size to wield, but for the world's greatest blacksmith, it was hardly impossible.

---

Cedric's healing was nearly complete. He would easily destroy Kracht, and what little of the multiverse remained would fall before the Amalgam not long after.

There would be no further delay. In mere seconds, the transport would be resumed and the Otaku Melee Ultimate All-Stars Grand Championship Tournament would reach its conclusion.

It turned out that was a few more seconds than the world's greatest blacksmith, wielding every hammer in existence and with his every movement sped up, needed to finish his work.

---

The silvermoonclockwhale sword was the ultimate weapon. From the Silver Anvil, it had the power to work with any inorganic materials; from the whale, it had Hector's power of life. With the clockwerk incorporated, it could create both in mere seconds, and whoever wielded it could move at great speed as well. Finally, the moon countered the influence of humanity and gave it the power of transformation.

It was the greatest weapon ever created.

It was also incredibly heavy. Even as Arkal fell, he knew he couldn't lift it on his own. He started to worry about whether it would be enough.

Would he be able to stop the Amalgam? Was it useless, in the end? As he reflected on his fears, he felt a great weight in one hand. The Stuff-gauntlet was reacting.

And then he smiled. He knew how to fix it. He removed the Stuff-gauntlet, holding the forgestone in his bare hand; it burned intensely, but he was nearly done. He wouldn't need to make any more weapons after this.

He pressed the forgestone against the gauntlet, reshaping it around the silvermoonclockwhale sword's hilt. He fashioned the Stuff into a new hilt, and found the weapon was now lighter than a feather.

But something was still missing, his instincts told him. There was one crucial element needed so that this sword could do what it was created to do.

Below him, he saw Jen clinging awkwardly to Xadrez' board, which was descending as slowly as it could. With the clockwerk's help, he sped up his fall so he was right beside them.

I have no idea what you intend to do, Arkal

but I fear it will do no good

despite my best efforts, our timeline is--

Arkal ignored the thoughts Xadrez was thinking at him and simply reached into the spirit's chest.

"Going to need this," he said, grabbing the Middle-Gem. He held it against the base of the blade, and used the forgestone to seal it in.

His hand was burning. It didn't matter any more. He was done.

At that very moment, Cedric's wounds were completely healed. The Amalgam readied the two finalists for transport.

Still falling, Arkal raised the ultimate weapon over his head, and swung it at nothing.

At the same time, he swung it at everything.

With the Middle-Gem in its hilt, the weapon was the Place. As Arkal swung, all across the Place, the Amalgam fragments felt the sting of the moon, and felt something remaking them. The Silver City receded, overtaken by the new Place.

Life arose, little of it human. Civilizations formed.

The blow rung out from the pittance of fragments crawling over the Place, and struck the Amalgam itself. Life, Creation, and Transformation rang through the Amalgam-filled multiverse, and in the space of an instant, entire worlds arose where before there had been only humanity.

Now there was Everything.

There are many ways to become a god.

Some create a universe and become one by default. Some do it by surpassing all others in their field. Others kill an existing god and take its place.

Arkal of the Silver No-Longer-an-Anvil had just done all three. The multiverse took notice.

The power of the weapon he wielded, the power of the dying Amalgam, and the power of the newly-created worlds all flowed into him. He screamed as he felt far more power than he'd ever thought possible, and disappeared in midair.

Arkal was a god now. And there was a task he had to complete.

---

Kracht and Cedric were floating in limbo, their transportation incomplete with the Amalgam's death. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but stare at each others' motionless forms for eternity.

And then a voice called out.

"Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you. There's just a little paperwork to take care of while we process the change in management."

There was a flash of light, and five figures appeared in the void.

"Greetings, contestants," said the Redeemer. "I'm here to officially declare that control of the, ahem, Otaku Melee Ultimate All-Stars Grand Championship Tournament, who came up with that ridiculous name anyways, has been transferred from the late Amalgam to the Smith, newly ascended from mortality."

The Redeemer motioned to Arkal on his right.

"The other three" - he pointed to Jen, Xadrez, and Hector - "will serve as witnesses that this transfer has been conducted in accordance with the terms of the Contract," he continued. "With the formalities dealt with, I leave this duty to you, Smith. My business here is done, at least until it's time to collect the loser."

He faded into nothingness.

Arkal wasn't too happy about the title he'd apparently just gained, but he understood what he needed to do.

"Now, I've never actually managed one of these before," Arkal began, sounding a little short of breath, "but, well, apparently there's a very unbreakable contract that says this thing has to be done. And because I just killed the entity that was supposed to do it, the job falls on my shoulders. So let's give you a final round."

Arkal raised the ultimate weapon, and in an instant, a massive empty platform unfolded below the two finalists. Stone walls slowly grew from the edges, then weapon racks lined the walls and filled the room. All the racks were full.

"Welcome to the Workshop," he said. "This place has a copy of every weapon I've ever made. Pick up a weapon, hit the other guy with it until he dies. That's pretty much all you need to know."

Three chairs appeared from nowhere. Arkal, Jen, and Hector sat down, not really having anything to do except watch. Xadrez just floated in place. A dark red barrier emerged around the seats, and Arkal tapped his hammer, unfreezing the contestants.

Cedric didn't waste any time - he lunged at the gallery, tore a hole in the barrier, and punched the Smith in the gut through it.

"I'll take this weapon," he said, grabbing the silvermoonclockwhalesword. "It's clearly the strongest weapon here."

"Nice going, Arkal," Kracht grumbled. "It was bad enough when Cedric had the Amalgam's aid, but you're going to insist on playing fair, aren't you?"

"Can't do much about it now," Arkal gasped, picking himself up. Grandmaster or not, Cedric's blow had seriously hurt him. "I can tell you there's a weapon in here that can beat him, though. It's not over yet."

"Preposterous!" Cedric declared. He kicked another hole in the barrier, just for the sake of striking the Smith in the shins the moment he got to his feet. "No weapon can defeat me! I am the greatest swordsman of all time, and I wield the greatest of weapons! I will not lose to a mere rock!"

Cedric swung the ultimate weapon, and a massive oak tree flew out of the blade and hurtled towards Kracht. In a panic, he grabbed a nearby mace and swung it at the incoming tree.

It shot out a burst of flames, and the tree burned to ash. Cedric scowled.

"Need something bigger," he said, and waved the weapon again.

This time, it sent out a bigger oak tree, which met the same fate as its predecessor. Cedric was not a very creative thinker.

"Useless thing," he said, rushing forward. "I don't need any fancy tricks. I'll just crack this rock open with one blow!"

"Really, thanks a lot, Arkal!" Kracht shouted as Cedric advanced. In desperation, he flung the mace and ran to the nearest rack, but Cedric simply swatted it aside.

It did buy Kracht time, however, and by good fortune the rack he found held a copy of the Amalgam-blade. A moment later, Cedric swung, and Kracht parried the blow instinctively, the sword of all swords guiding him.

Then it shattered into pieces. There was no question which weapon was stronger.

"Shit."

With his best hope against the assault shattered, Kracht simply ran, grabbing whatever weapons he could find and flinging them at the advancing wall of bearded swordsman. Cedric wasn't able to make much use of the creative potential of his weapon, but he could block with impossible speed. Even on the rare times when something bypassed his guard, he simply laughed off the pain.

Kracht felt alone, abandoned, and desperate. He had just picked up a sword and was about to throw it in another futile gesture when he saw there were words engraved on the surface. When he realized what they said, he nearly laughed.

"To my wonderful sons, Koule and Eselt..." he began.

Cedric paused. He felt something strange in the depths of his heart, a long-buried feeling that the words called to the surface.

His father had never called him wonderful. The bastard never would have. Not even after he became the champion of all humanity.

The silvermoonclockwhale sword felt heavier, suddenly. Cedric slowed for a moment, but still held it up with sheer strength. He would not be deterred.

But Kracht was still reading.

"I love you both, and I'm very proud of you..."

The weapon fell again. Cedric gripped it with both hands this time, to lift it again and inched closer.

Kracht was just out of his range.

Sweating profusely, he raised the ultimate weapon above his head and took another desperate step forward to prepare for the final blow.

"Your loving father, Arkal," Kracht concluded.

Cedric screamed in anguish. As he did, the Stuff grip proved too much for him. The ultimate weapon slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor of the Workshop, with Cedric standing directly beneath it.

The battle to end all battles had concluded. The final opponent had been slain by a father's love for his sons.

There was a round of applause. Even Xadrez clapped halfheartedly.

Arkal stopped clapping to wipe a tear from his eye. With a tap of his hammer, he dispelled what was left of the barrier.

"That was beautiful," he said. "Sorry things got out of control. Guess this job isn't as easy as it looks.

Kracht didn't say anything.

"Anyhow, you've won," Arkal continued. "That means you get a prize. I'm afraid it won't be worth all the trouble and heartbreak you've been through, because your prize is a lot more trouble and heartbreak. Xadrez!"

what do you want from me the spirit grumbled.

I have already been forced to watch this final mockery of a battle

is it not bad enough that we failed to set up the time loop, that our timeline may cease to exist

but that now you force me to watch these insipid battles reach their conclusion

I could at least have the consolation of the Grandmasters and their worthless battles ending forever in a failure

or perhaps distracted myself by tearing fragments apart

but now you had to take even that from me

"That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. You still have the memories, right?"

I do not know, or care, how you learned of them

but yes

Xadrez held up the stick.

what good will they do, Arkal

the events have already played out the wrong way--

"And we have the memories he'd have if they'd played out the other way," Arkal said. "It's an ugly solution, and it's not fair to him, but it'll get the job done and that's all we can ask for."

He grabbed the stick and slapped it on the side of Kracht's head. The green man screamed as the stick faded and the memories flowed through him.

"I'm sorry about this," Arkal said. "On the bright side, you won't remember it. I'm afraid that your prize for winning the, uh, what was it again... Otaku Melee Ultimate All-Stars Grand Championship Tournament is a bunch of memories and being sent through a time loop to relive most of them."

Arkal groaned. Cedric had hit harder than he'd realized, or maybe it was his old body not being cut out to hold this much power. Either way, he felt he didn't have much longer.

But, as he was reminded when the Redeemer reappeared, there were still things to take care of.

"You can't send him back," the Redeemer said angrily. "It was one thing when the timeline was likely to be consumed by the Amalgam, but now it's gone. There's a new multiverse forming, you set it there yourself. And I will not see you simply overwrite it. What gives your timeline precedence over ours?"

I might ask you the same question Xadrez interjected. The Redeemer pointed a finger at him and he lay silent.

"Your opinion isn't relevant here," the Redeemer said. "Our timeline is already here, and I'd prefer it stay that way. Unless the Smith would like to challenge my authority? I doubt the humans will be able to."

"I've got a name," Arkal muttered.

"Name or not, challenge me if you want your timeline to remain. You're the only one here strong enough to."

As the Redeemer spoke, Hector walked over to the ultimate weapon and looked at it.

"I thought I saw the Middle-Gem on that thing," he said.

Jen walked over beside him.

"Oh, yeah, I saw Arkal grab it," she said. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Save both timelines? Well, it may take a few trillion years for ours to get back up to snuff, but I'm game for it."

"What are you mortals babbling about?"

"It's simple. The Middle-Gem and the Place are one. And this weapon used the Middle-Gem to recreate the multiverse. So the entire new multiverse, with maybe an exception or two, is part of the Place."

He touched his hand to the gem.

"And, as King of the Place, I have the authority to store the whole of it in the Middle-Gem. All they need to do is bring it back to their own timeline, and we can stay in there until someone finds a big enough place to store a multiverse. Our timeline is preserved, theirs is preserved, everyone wins."

"Except the people in the countless timelines in between," Kracht muttered, a moment before falling comatose.

There was an awkward pause.

"They don't exist yet and won't exist by the time we do," Jen said finally. "Frankly, saving two timelines is pretty good in my book."

"This is acceptable," said the Redeemer. "I'll fetch the last few holdouts and shove them into Place territory." He snapped his fingers. "Done. Except a few beyond my reach, but if they're that powerful, they can probably handle a timeline wipe."

"Then let's store it. Place, I command you: rest within the Middle-Gem!"

There was a flash of light, as streams of universes flooded into the Workshop and flowed into the gem. When it was over, Hector stood over it, satisfied.

"Good work, Your Majesty. Now for us."

The Redeemer grabbed Hector by the shoulder, and pulled them both into the gem. The room was silent.

Xadrez waved his spectral arms frantically. Apparently he had things to say, or think at least.

"I'll take care of it in a minute," Arkal grumbled, picking up the ultimate weapon. "We've got a few things to take care of. First, Kracht."

Arkal tapped the Omnihammer against Kracht's prone form, and the green man vanished. The loop was set into motion.

"Now for us," he said, gasping for breath. "I'm afraid I only have the strength in me for one jump. And I'm going to pick where it is. No arguments."

Xadrez raised an arm in protest.

"I'll give you your voice back when I transport us. Hang on."

He tapped his hammer against the ground.

this is our chance to escape, or to strike back against the Grandmasters, and you would squander it without consultation Xadrez protested.

But his thoughts were cut off as he, Arkal, and Jen all vanished.

Moments later (to the extent 'moment' and 'later' make sense in a realm beyond time), the Workshop crumbled into nonexistence.

---

The city of Eddelin was one of the busiest in the world. There was always something going on. If you stopped someone on the street and told them that today you were planning to attend a symposium on the ancient kingdom of Sanjegoria, and then watch a performance of the renowned play The Warlock and the Mockingbird, their response would be "Is that all?"

Of course, to a pair of young men, these events were quite important. The events themselves were a point of pride to the respective men, but the fact that both were happening on the same day in the same city made the occasion all the more significant. When they realized the coincidence of scheduling, they wrote to each other and arranged to meet for lunch.

And so it was that two brothers who hadn't seen each other in more than three years, a scholar and an actor, walked into a dingy tavern for a meal.

It wasn't the nicest place in Eddelin, and they could both afford nicer. But the food was secondary. They were here to talk more than to eat.

Besides, their father loved this place.

"I can't believe I haven't even heard anything new about him in months," Koule said between bites at his sandwich. "He's always making a spectacle of himself wherever he goes. I'm actually surprised you two don't get on better."

"Perhaps he's gotten lost in his work," Eselt said, smiling. "He's been known to disappear into the smithery for days at a time. Reminds me of a certain someone and his books."

"I hope you're not making fun of me, dear brother."

"Perish the thought! I'll be watching your presentation with great interest this afternoon. Why, I've even asked the rest of the company to come along."

"And you don't expect to understand anything I say," Koule said with a smirk.

"Not a word! But damned if you won't say it with passion and feeling. That's something I can always appreciate."

They shared a hearty laugh, trying to talk about anything beyond their fears. Usually they heard some tale of their father's exploits as they journeyed, but the last few months had brought a worrying lack of news.

Their mother had died only three years ago, surrounded by her loving family. Had their father died somewhere in the wilderness, alone? Both Koule and Eselt had their share of regrets, had things they wished they'd said to him when they had the chance.

But Saera's passing hadn't been the time, and all of them lead busy lives. Even this meeting had been more by chance than by plan.

That specter hung over the entire conversation. It was a joyous day for both, and the smiles and laughs they shared were real. But so, too, was the unspoken worry.

A church bell rang, echoing through the city.

"Damn, already?" Koule said, pushing away his empty plate and standing up. "I can't stay much longer, I'm afraid. I'm going to need the better part of an hour to prepare for my talk."

"Break a leg, then!"

"Yes, you too. I'm looking forward to your performance this evening. I only wish Father could be there..."

There was a bright flash of light before them.

"I don't think I'll be able to make it to see either of you," Arkal gasped. "Not in the flesh, at least. But I'm sure you'll both do a wonderful job."

Koule and Eselt stared in awe at their father. He was kneeling, and clearly in pain, but there was a smile on his face. They were so focused on him they barely paid any notice to the young girl in unusual clothing, or the spectral figure on a floating chessboard, or even the enormous and bizarre weapon their father held in his grip.

Eselt recovered his composure first, mostly due to his training.

"Well, I must say, you've got a wonderful sense of timing," he said. He walked calmly over to his father's side, and was greeted with a powerful hug.

"Father, where have you - how - why..." Koule's questions trailed off as he saw Eselt's response. The answers didn't matter. He simply walked over and received another hug.

"I'm proud of you both," Arkal said, reaching into a scabbard at his side. "I'm afraid there's no time to say all the things we want to say, boys, but I thought ahead. These are my last words to you."

They protested. He'd be fine. There was so much to talk about.

He smiled, even as he felt his body growing heavier.

"I love you," he said to both, before he fell to the ground.

He would never get up again.

---

The Observer tossed one last piece of rubble aside, groaning. How long had he been out of commission? What had happened in the multiverse? What was going on with his other battle?

He turned to face the massive void the remnants of the Speakeasy floated in. He looked into it, and saw everything.

The Ovoid was dead. The Charlatan had stolen his battle... the entire timeline was nearly erased? The hell? And one of his contestants had ascended? Just how bad had things gotten?

He stared a few seconds more. The Smith was dead. Well, that was one less problem, at least. The battle was still out of control, and he was going to have some harsh words with the Charlatan. But dammit, he was taking his battle back.

Fortunately, it seemed he didn't have to bother coming up with a round. The surviving contestants were already lost. All he had to do was make sure they knew who was in charge. He snapped his fingers, materialized in the tavern, and everything around him stopped.

"Congratulations!" his voice boomed in Jen and Xadrez' ears. "You two are the finalists of the Grand Battle, Season Two! And this is the final round: the city of Eddelin! It's one of the largest cities on your old friend Arkal's homeworld. Travelers come here from all over, there's a lot of important buildings, and there's just a ton of stuff going on all the time! Plays, academic lectures, I think there might be a festival starting up soon... There's just so much to do here!"

The Observer took a few steps away and snapped raised a hand, readying his fingers.

"Of course, there's only one thing for you two to be doing, and that's killing each other. But hey, there's no rule saying you can't have some fun while you're at it! Good luck, both of you!"

He snapped his fingers to start time again, and prepared to leave. There was no way he was letting the contestants lay a finger on him this time.

Jen rested her hand on Xadrez’ chessboard. “Don’t.”

The spirit glowered. don’t, she says

forgive me for bemoaning your juvenile sentimentality and thereby fulfilling the stock character role assigned to me but the youths are now grandmasterkin

affecting to ignore the narrative confluence that is bound to carry in their wake would be our first move towards utterly losing control of events yet a sixth time

”I’m not saying we ignore them,” snapped Jen. “I’m saying we let their string out a bit and see where they lead us.”

well feel free to doubt my judgment as the one of us who achieved cosmic metacausal awareness while you were off blowing up the moon

i bow to your feminine intuition

please let’s scatter our every advantage on the wind and go out for coffee hoping to return to find they have sprouted mighty advantageous oaks

which we shall climb straight up to the cyclops’ cloud-castle and slay him with the magic sword you’re letting that enfeebled academic walk away with right now

Koule had, indeed, picked up the sword, though he wasn’t walking anywhere. A constable had briefly been summoned, only to find that the victim in question had vanished into light; the officer now seemed to be debating inwardly whether he might accept this as a boon on his clearance rate or insure against his liability through the requisite paperwork. “Assuming that you can retain control of everything,” ventured Jen, “And then working outward from the thing you want most is the opposite of a plan, Xed. Check your cosmic awareness with a little self-awareness now and then, hmm?”

Eddelin had that kind of energy generally associated with post-nuclear cities--it “moved fast”--and life on the street had already returned to normal. Certainly the young girl in the bright green battledress and the morose-looking spirit in purple weren’t attracting any attention other than mild annoyance on the basis of their occupying space. the observer, offered Xadrez, dead

this is not a motivation i expect to be argued out of

pragmatically, sentimentally, ethically, it is our objective

to deny it is to hasten the moment when one of us kills the other

unless you’re thinking of taking the easy way out and submitting to his terms

”It crossed my mind,” admitted Jen. “Wouldn’t be difficult.”

”What would be difficult for you would be to think for ten seconds

We just saw Kracht win three consecutive battles the last hosted by possibly the most benevolent ‘grandmaster’ who might ever have been said to exist

his ‘boon’ was an infinity of living hells followed by the gift of being slammed to death by a mer-dominatrix

this battle isn’t like your regency you can’t just pop out of it refreshed and jetlagged and ready to report in to work the next week

this is a story that ends in total annihilation or the observer’s blood

Jen sniffed the air. “There’s coffee,” she announced. “I need coffee. Join me.” She practically skipped into an open-air cafe. Xadrez weighed his priorities briefly, marked down the direction in which Arkal’s sons were walking off, and followed his battler.

It seems impolite to remind you though you seem so intent on wilfully ignoring the fact

But I could always simply order you to be a more productive brand of obstinant

in accordance with the life debt you failed so utterly to discharge in the previous round

Jen ordered a caramel-themed beverage before turning to respond. “That’s half a bluff, Xed. You understand the situation has changed.”

Xadrez nudged a chair out of the way and rested his spectral elbows on the table opposite his interlocutor. the rescue of the timeline that enabled our continued existence occurred entirely without your agency

I see no way in which the situation might have changed

”There’s a contradiction now,” explained Jen. “The geas incurred when you brought me back from life was always in tension with the contract of the Battle itself. But that was a minor stipulation back when there were three-odd other foes for us to fight against. Now the life-debt in the battle are in direct contradiction. Cosmologically, I can’t be expected to serve your will and protect your life while we’re also locked into a one-must-live-one-must-die destiny-style thing.”

Xadrez rapped his fingers intangibly against the table. The waiter dropped by with Jen’s coffee.

“So this becomes interesting,” said Jen. “The second you try and issue a command, that will collapse the contradiction and prove one geas to be stronger than the other. Either I’ll be compelled to obey or I won’t. And the battle’s geas is stronger the less leverage we have against the Observer. So I might conclude by that that it’s in my best interest, if I thought you had some intention of abusing my obligations, to keep the round proceeding normally until we have an opportunity to go forward on my terms. Or until I save your life.”

Xadrez’ eye twitched. arkal dead

the two of us standing on the threshold of annihilation

and all you can think of is negotiating a shred of autonomy

are you really so confident

Jen sipped contentedly at her mug and leaned over the table with a wicked grin. “Have you met me, Xed?”

* * * * *

Eddelin City!

Soaring architecture. Strange music emanating from alleys. Attractive rich people buying flowers and jewelry from attractive poor people. Just enough diversity to keep things interesting while preserving the seductive mystique of the other. Temperate and sunny.

The city was unwalled but Koule always thought of Eddelin as surrounded by an invisible aura that kept the cynics at bay. One could not spend a night in the Percussion District or take lunch at University East without being overwhelmed by a sense of hope and progress. Here in Eddelin, every conceivable branch of human (er, sapient) achievement and knowledge was being pushed to its boundaries. Thanks to Koule’s work, even the past seemed to be moving forward.

His father was dead. Koule felt like the future had taken an arrow to the gut.

The taxonomy of the sciences at U. East seemed always to be shifting around as its practitioners reevaluated the ways in which the cosmos herself categorized her processes. So it took Koule a few precious minutes, wandering around campus with a sword twice the size of his arm, to establish that his colleague Votchke was now working out of the sub-basement of the “Deep Sciences” department alongside a new hire specializing in marine anatomy and radical ethics. “Dear gods,” proclaimed Votchke over the rim of her micromonocle. “That’s some instrument you’ve got there, Koule. Is this how you pump yourself up before lectures?”

“Votchke, listen,” panted Koule. “I don’t have a lot of time before the talk but I need a favor.” He tossed the sword down on her desk. “Something happened to my father and I need your help to understand what it was. This was the last sword he made.”

“The last--oh gods, Koule.” Votchke cleared off the desk with a crude sweep of her arm and examined the sword. “The last, as in, the most recent, or…”

“He’s dead, Votchke.” Koule pulled up a stool. “I don’t know how. I think this sword might have... changed him, somehow. He was different at the end. Really different. I don’t know--”

Votchke rested a hand on Koule’s cheek, one eye on the sword. “Okay. Listen, Koule. I know you don’t really have the qualifications to understand this, but there’s cutting-edge, and then there’s Arkal of the Silver Anvil. I never really wanted to mouth off to you about how much of an admirer I was, because, I don’t know, my impression is that things were awkward between you, but… he’s a cited figure in a number of fields. Metallurgy, military theory, sculpture. Just as, what, a halo effect from how good he was at what he did.”

Koule searched around for a window to look out of but found only the marine anatomist hunching over a flayed dolphin at the desk adjacent. “He was the best. I know that.”

“And when you’re that good at something there’s always the risk that you’re going to discover something that will change everything, starting with you. Genius is dangerous.”

Koule looked at the sword on the table. “Are you saying you won’t take a look at it?”

Votchke smiled. “I’m just letting you know that I’m taking an extraordinary risk and you owe me dinner, at the very least. I’ll start right away. You should go prep for the talk.”

“I need a few more minutes here.”

“Okay.”

“Work out loud. Just keep talking to me.”

“Okay, Koule. Make yourself comfortable.” Votchke hefted the sword. “I mean obviously the first thing I’m going to say is that this is probably the best sword, ever.”

“It’s light,” added Koule.

“Yeah. It’s light in all the right ways and heavy in all the right ways. I don’t know swordplay but damn.”

“So what’s it made of?”

The deep scientist held the weapon up to her micromonocle. “I’m seeing silver but that makes no sense, on any level.” She scratched at the sword with a fingernail. “There’s no reason to make a sword out of silver and if you did, it wouldn’t be anything like this. Also it doesn’t smell like silver.”

“Smell?”

“Smell. Here, smell.” Votchke swung the sword alarmingly close to Koule’s nose. A rancid, dimly familiar smell hit his nostrils. “That’s a biological smell. So there’s a biological component here. Which isn’t my--”

”Blubber,” said the marine anatomist.

“Pardon?” asked Koule.

The new hire whirled around in her chair. ”That your smelling’s blubber of a baleen whale. Your da’s sword is whale in part. Trust me.”

Koule turned back to Votchke. “Does that… help?”

Votchke sniffed the sword again. “Well, it helps me understand how eclectic an instrument it is we’re dealing with exactly.”

Koule smiled and sighed. “Well, thanks for accelerating our bafflement. I don’t believe we’ve met. You are?”

He blinked and she was in front of him, a slick hand outstretched. Under a thin coat was the smooth, naked skin of some sort of mer. Koule felt his grief roughly drowned in the shallow surf of something between fear and arousal. ”Kath,” she answered. ”Marine anatomy and radical ethics.” Kath pulled a dolphin eyeball out of her pocket and popped it into her mouth, chewing slowly. Five seconds later she stuck out her tongue to reveal an optic nerve tied in a bow, which she pressed into Koule’s hand as though it were the most intimate of gifts. ”And one who’d appreciate a closer look at that sword.”

Koule felt himself immersed. Sinking.

An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent

He snapped his fingers to start time again, and prepared to leave. There was no way he was letting the contestants lay a finger on him this time.

He glanced across the street, and snapped his other fingers, the ones which stopped time in a different direction. He glanced across the street again.

Huh. Must've been imagining things. There was an insubstantial hand on his shoulder, insubstantiating its way through a fair bit of his torso, before it all froze solid and shattered.

Not quite sure what to make of this, the Observer slowed everything down again, time enough to groan inwardly that his bout with the contestants had kept him sharp. He picked through the slivers of time until he found her, snuck in like a spectro-temporal splinter through the tiniest moment of his inattention.

Composer's eyes were a blazing duality, white-hot rage and frigid cold . More startled than he should've been at the destruction of his corporeal form, Observer could've been forgiven for coming up short on ideas.

Then, he fucking punched her.

It was about as effectual as you'd expect, though the Composer at least obliged by coalescing into something capable of looking murderous. Condensed down like this, she hurt to look at the way sunlight glared off snow.

"How dare you," she hissed, her constituent souls murmuring in agreement. Observer raised an eyebrow, and rolled down the sleeve on his punching arm.

"You're, uh, going to have to have to fill me in here," he said. The crystalline shards of the Grandmaster still drifting about the frozen scene halted, disintegrating with a screech and a hurricane roar. The Observer weathered another outburst of mostly-superficial assault, more out of courtesy than anything. When it abated and he opened his eye again, the Composer-hued cloud had settled about Xadrez, crackling in accusation.

Observer gave half a nonplussed shrug, before wait, no.

Oh yeah!

--

Xadrez, unaware of any attention he might have been receiving, was having more trouble with this Final Round business than he cared to let on to Jen. He toyed with the dagger instead, trying to rebuild some semblance of a mental map on the obsidian. Jen peered over her mug, staring more at the knife than its movements.

"Did Arkal make you a new one?"

What

no

I found this one in the Place

He sounded vaguely offended, curling his fist a little to block Jen's sight of it with his arm.

This is the

well

a

masterwork blade of Saber, the Forgelord

losing my original was an amateur error

one I do not intend to repeat

Escaping the Fates' ministrations unlike the likes of you, I’m not handed second chances ad infinitum to rectify mistakes

Jen stuck her tongue out, lapping at her drink for that essential extra dose of juvenile petulance. Xadrez ignored her, taking the dagger in both hands and glaring at it.

There is no benevolence, nothing redeemable to be found in the Grandmasters' ranks

No good comes of those who could perceive a universe's majesty and thence aspire to a roost where all that becomes a mere curiosity

a toy

I'm- he glanced up, giving Jen a look that might’ve been trying to seek affirmation. Jen stared back over the rim of her mug.

increasingly certain that we made the wrong choice

I've no love for the rock yet in silence we were made complicit to his suffering, and for whose concept of order? Another omnipotent entity's

Despite the lives lost over those sixty-four battles, the innumerable more in the amalgam's conquest

the culmination was a multiverse, restored

all but one known Grandmaster, the rest dead or stripped of influence

I should note the Silver Hand's Network, even with devious goals, was responsible for the majority of Grandmaster deaths across Kracht's many timelines

these memories lay bare as such, Xadrez sighed, letting a sleeve shimmer, and I cannot do Kracht the small dignity of knowing what is now his true pain

From where we stand, back in our present, he's already died

He entered this battle knowing he was going to die

After those innumerable cycles retrofitted by causality again and again to challenge the Amalgam

this time with no spark of hope in uncertainty that his efforts would not be undone

For what

For 'the stability of wider reality' spat the tactician.

For perpetuity of a rotten system

Its upon such 'stable' ground that the strong overpower the weak, a place without subtlety or trickery

A lesser man would've denied all those memories

I would've, he growled, glaring at Jen, and I've little doubt you would likewise attempt to invalidate them

Yet here we are

He did all that was asked of him

With no assurance his death this death was worthwhile

"What's happened’s happened," Jen finally said, but Xadrez wasn't listening. He'd frozen, the point of his dagger partway through a fingertip, staring off and away.

No

How would-

Xadrez glanced at Jen, seemingly collected himself, then scanned his surroundings for something inorganic to slice into pieces. He settled for cutlery; found time in his urgency to carefully score the metal, bending the knives and forks into angular coils. The tactician shuffled them around, put them back, reviewed his robes, stared at the dagger for another while, and shuffled the pieces round again. That done, he scratched at his temple with the dagger-tip while glaring across the table, giving Jen one of his more transparently calculating looks.

Jen licked cream off her nose in response. Xadrez narrowed his eyes, jammed the dagger in his trapezius, and made for the exit.

in the unlikely event you style your excursions in some worthwhile fashion, contact me

I have inquiries to make


---

It felt like the metaphorical eternity ago, but yeah. That's right. When the Observer got the whole "run a second season" idea in his head, he went back to his homeworld. See how the place was faring, maybe grab that Chrome Witch from the legends if nobody had figured out how to permanently kill her.

On review, Observer remembered why he'd left. The place was falling apart at the seams; he hadn't planned on killing Scout with his escape, but she certainly hadn't survived all those eons to contest his intrusion.

Or, you know, running off with one of her demigods. He figured why not save the Mirrorlands for an All-Stars round or something?

Right, right. So yeah, Scout here was pretty rightfully pissed, because-

Hang on.

Shit.

The Observer made a move to run, but ice crystallised around all the edges of his vision. He raised an exasperated hand at the hissing Composer, his sleeve cracking.

"Ok, if we're going to do this, can I at least get my battle moving again?" He gestured at Jen and Xadrez; the shoal of souls flickered in a way that made them look a little less inhuman. It paused, blinked, and took a deep breath, though best as Observer could tell it didn’t have any discernible anatomy. A critical glare jumped from Jen to the Observer.

"What risk does she pose to Xadrez?"

Observer blinked. "Some? None? Last I checked, they're both more interested in trying to kill me."

"...Fine. We'll settle this in the Conservatory."

"How about hell no?" countered Observer. "Back to my office."

The Composer hacked up some rather derisive noise, to the tune of glaciers calving. "And have your coward self slink off through another incompetence-induced hole in reality? Unlikely."

The Observer made a futile gesture. "Look, do you want to lecture me, or kill me?" The Composer snarled, and whirled about as though seeking an exit, hissing some agitated litany to herself and trying not to look at her fellow Grandmaster. The Observer tried rearranging his physical form a bit, to see if she’d slice it apart again, and took the reknitting of his lapels as a good sign.

“I just thought of a place. Follow me.”

---

Xadrez drifted the streets of Eddelin, keeping half an ear out for the piece he'd tossed Eselt's way before following Jen. By the cut of his robes, some of the New Battleopolis rounds had featured shades not of other battlers, but of persons from the contestants' pasts. Arkal would have seen his sons a final time there, usually before Kracht was shaped into a sword and the Ovoid dredged up a legion and ascended, Arkal's human-traitor blood fuelling the transaction.

Xadrez had had a hand in that; berated himself as his immediate justification was to dismiss it as a rock's memory. One thousand memories. One million misplaced loyalties. A doubt crept into Xadrez' head; that if this iteration were the terminus, the one where causality finally broke the right way, why had he still wasted so much time beneath the Ovoid's banner?

What heft, in the end, had his fate - his allegiances? What sway, a moon upon its sun?

The spirit's piece-keeping led him to a large building, mythical beasts and heroes of legend carved upon its facade. A theatre, guessed Xadrez, mostly with the confirmation that Eselt had just taken a back entrance. Xadrez would've followed Koule with the sword, but for his worrisome finding.

He wasn't sure, when Kath stepped from behind a serpent-frescoed pillar, whether what he felt was relief.

"That didn't take you," said Kath. Xadrez decided to not mention the chess piece she still carried, passing her a fresh one instead.

Well met, your majesty

Blame my movements to date for the order of these questions but

When by your estimation did we last meet

And how have you been occupying yourself

"Been chasing a bunch of tributaries since you left me high and dry in that beige-sky zoo." The maid had procured some nice leather armor, Xadrez guessed crocodilian from the scutes, with some magical tracery that implied it folded away when she swam. She also sported a pelt of some unfortunate animal or another, forelimbs wrapped around her throat.

I'm

truthfully pleased to hear that

you've certainly matured if you put your mind to conquest before petty revenge

no, Xadrez sighed, or he might've been chuckling- it makes this decision of mine appreciably less agonising

my goal my motive behind all these fetters and obligations an end to the grandmasters, I must exploit both pools of my resources

the material- he motioned to Kath, flicked his hand in a wider arc toward the city at large, until his fingers rested on the hem of his robe. He hoped the tense lines of his arms were concealed in the cloth, that Kath didn’t see his brain tick over and settle into the most comfortable truth he had. -and the

erm

less material

and the latter makes it very clear

That youre my

the multiverses

my best hope to see slain a grandmaster or seven

Xadrez extracted his knife, traced out his sleeves again. Beyond a few key threads wound around each finger, the bulk of it was the history of his battles- no, Kracht's first battles - the hundreds of thousands of Observer-led fights where Xadrez to varying degrees of consistency kept fucking everyone over.

And in all those openings, not a single Grandmaster died. The midgame and endgame, certainly, but those self-styled gods played on boards where single pieces were battlefields again, mass graves for the like of Xadrez and Jen and Arkal and all the rest.

After Kracht won (check the back of the collar for care instructions), through the multiversal chronology of All-Stars and All-Stars All Stars, Kath's queendom-then-empire became a recognised, if peripheral, force in the Multiverse's politics. She marched off to her own All-Stars eyes blazing; left a ghost of a ghost as regent. Died out there, somewhere, but not before (statistically, usually) killing off another Grandmaster.

Xadrez hesitated, still. This was Kath, after all. Rules were, obviously, made to be broken in accord with a higher order of rules, but guilt was eternal. You needed foundations somewhere, and five was the fewest moves in which you could promote a pawn. He almost asked himself what other choice he had, before realising he'd hover outside this theatre until someone important died of old age.

He straightened, pulled out the dagger.

Kath, slightly more attuned by now to her general’s mannerisms, watched as Xadrez closed his other hand into a fist, pulling tight the four threads wrapped around his fingers. He traced them up his forearm through the weave with his knife, a myriad false histories splitting and fluttering down into a pile of golden fibres. His sleeve was now cut raggedly off at the shoulder, an emaciated arm trailing four sparkling threads. Xadrez, still working silently, gathered up the spare cloth he’d cut, fashioning it as best he could. The result was more a circlet than the crown he’d been aiming for, but he’d gotten the color right.

“And that’s your idea of a coronation gift?” Kath asked, somewhat understandably bored by this point. Xadrez shrugged.

It is not so much the shape as the substance

You would not be privy to it from the perspectives gained with this crown, being from all of those battles in which you were not yet an Agent

and yet-

“-I’m the special one,” Kath snapped. “All the other times the Grandmasters find me later. Old news, General.”

-Right, Xadrez didn’t quite avoid a stunned pause, yes

The fates decreed deicide your birthright your highness whenether I serve by your side or not

I’ve witnessed it, satisfied in turn the terms by which I agreed to be your willing soldier

So he said, a little more softly, proffering the crown a little, urging Kath to step into place. She looked sceptical, but a glint across her eyes and a divination curled up in a sneer assured her this wasn’t a trap. Just a ghost, clawed hands clinging to something - anything - familiar. The queen shrugged, took the step forward, and Xadrez placed the circlet upon her head.

this my formal recognition

of a life debt forged, ratified across timelines in devils blood

between the rightful queen and her general

until their ends or the grandmasters

and let us not pray but strive instead that it be the latter before the former

Kath tolerated the crown for all of half a minute, before plucking it off and twisting it twice about her wrist. “You done? Good. Let’s get, then, we’ve got less than an hour before the lecture.”

Before the what

“Before the thing that’s going to be your first job as my tactics-man, unless I find a better use for you. The point’s brute force won’t work, right? So, you tell me why we should learn about Sanjegoria before going off and killing some Grandmasters.”

Xadrez was disoriented more than anything. He considered for a moment arguing, convincing Kath to take this more seriously, but he couldn’t be sure. Too many unknowns, and his liege had offered only one line of inquiry. Xadrez narrowed his eyes, tried to instil some suspicion into the draw of his knife.

To begin my inquiries then

who or what is Sanjegoria

---

The Composer was arranged, for lack of a more evocative word, atop a roof to a temple of Cynisca. Observer couldn’t read her posture, made as she appeared to be of a drifting spire of spectral vortices with her usual head on top of it. He offered a waxed-parchment cup in what he hoped was general area an arm might emerge from. Her neck didn’t turn, but she sure as hell was staring at him.

“What do you think that is?”

Observer checked the receipt. “A… strained goat-milk raspberry latte with extra cinnamon. I don’t know about the little biscuit on top, though, the barista put it there and-”

“That,” hissed the Composer, “is not what I was talking about.”

“Well you refused to set foot into the cafe, and if I tried reading your mind and figuring out what you actually wanted you’d be offended at that as well-”

“The issue is not the beverage-”

“Then tell me what the problem is!” groaned the Observer. The Composer’s eyes flashed with anger, an “is it not obvious” rising like mist off her cloak, but she didn’t speak for a full minute.

“You.”

“You left me for dead after you orchestrated Saber’s murder and escaped to the multiverse. You lied to me, claiming you sought only a window through the Cloak to the multiverse proper, not a gaping rift.”

“Ok, look, I’m not going to claim that wasn’t me-”

“But it seems like so long you barely remember?” snapped the goddess. “Your ugly disembowelling of a universe barely alights upon your conscience? Would you have ever regretted what you did if I were not here right now?”

She hadn’t moved from her seated position, beyond a mock-curious tilt of the head, but there was a morbid stillness to her form that distracted the Observer long enough for something vaporous and hissing to snarl the last few words right beside his face. Observer furrowed his brow for the Composer’s benefit, to show he was thinking hard, and took a sip of his coffee.

“Would you believe me-” he waited for the sentient cold snap to stop breathing down his neck “-would, you believe me, if I said to you it was something I just had to do?”

The Observer inhaled sharply, predicting another outburst, but the air didn’t stab within his lungs. The icy mannequin had stood, some subtle shift in its demeanour giving an impression of animation, if not quite life.

She almost nearly smiled. “I would.”

“Wait.” Observer let go of his coffee, the better to make some futile finger motions to spot the non-existent double-negative. “You would?”

“If you were an Aspect of Origin - or, more correctly, a sub-Aspect which Saber split off from himself - then yes. I think I could rationalise your actions.” Observer remained politely silent, repeating the finger motion a bit slower, a wordless keep-talking. “Saber was Origin’s aspects of Creation and Synthesis, and when Origin saw how external forces made the world beyond the Forge inhospitable, I was - Scout was formed, from His aspects of Preservation and Protection.” Her words weren’t so much accented as Capitalised, faintly resonating in that way concepts stuffed into a single spoken word tended to do. “And you. You were an offshoot of Saber. Discovery. Clarity. Scope.”

“Saber constructed you, from the purest materials he had, his own Aspects. You were built with the express purpose to seek all that existed beyond my Cloak, and you performed that purpose unerringly. I doubt you’ve got any better explanation for why you did it?”

The Observer had to admit that no, he didn’t, though most of this was going over his head. The Composer had clearly done more research than him into the big glowy sun-substitute from whence they’d all come, which, you know, was understandable. He made a move to sit down on the roof (they were still on the roof, right?), and, facing no objections, plucked the Composer’s drink out of the air where he’d left it, and proffered it again.

“I guess it’s a frappe now. If you still want it.” The Composer gave him one of her clearer expressions (the long-suffering kind), then deigned to fold herself into a sitting position. She took the cup, lifting the lid off the top and glaring at the contents.

“I’m sorry,” he finally managed. “It seemed like a great idea at the time, I guess. If I’d known you were going to get arbitrarily kicked out as well to chase after me-”

“So you’re sorry you got caught?”

“Wait, no, I-”

“It’s fine,” she snapped, closing her eyes and internally counting slowly. “It’s - it’s fine. I didn’t come here to kill you, simply to air my grievances. I was-” the Composer caught herself there, glancing at her fellow Grandmaster, reminding herself that this wasn’t tea with the Cultivator. “I don’t trust our colleagues to not use my history against me, and until I was informed you were responsible for my eviction, I’d been well prepared to forget my past life.”

“They were probably hoping you’d rip me apart in a blind rage,” said the Observer, sipping at his coffee and avoiding the Composer’s pointed stare. “Which I’m grateful you’re not doing. So thanks, or something.”

“You have the Cultivator to thank for that,” hummed the Grandmaster. “She convinced me that, in the long run, I’d be no happier having killed you for your past transgressions.

The Observer drained his drink, and stood. “So, an apology was all you wanted?”

“For ruining my old life, that will do.”

“Uh, right. Well, sorry then, again, but I’d really best-”

“That,” she said, “does not excuse the issue of Xadrez.” The Observer wilted, sighed, and sat back down again. “He was a personal favourite of mine amongst the souls I promoted, and even you could see my right to treat this a personal affront.” The Cloak unfurled again as she said that, but settled back into shape. “Of course, I’ve decided to not seek retribution, yet… his existence, his status, as a Battler; it’s an unpleasant dilemma.”

“Scout says save him, rip me apart for subjecting him to this at all; you say I’ve got too nice a face to do that?”

“Your face is irrelevant. If I stepped in to spare him this fate on the feelings of a dead god, then we’ve come full circle to using my past as precedent to disrupt the order.”

The Observer shrugged, trying not to sound too flat-footed without his usual jovial mask on. “Your choice, really. I mean, this might’ve been a better discussion to have, you know, before it hit the final round. If I switched him out for someone less objectionable now, it’d be pretty anticlimactic, get what I'm saying?” The Composer looked for a moment like she was thinking really hard about whether to be offended by that, before sighing. He hastened, “He’s trying really hard to find a way to kill me, if that’s any consolation. The last two? The Organizer’s goons had to hold their hands - uh, pseudopods? Metaphorical hands. Whatever. anyway, getting them to put their dukes up, that was the real battle.”

He got one raised Grandmistrous brow for his efforts, a very deliberate sip at her coffee which didn’t quite hide her smirk. “Good. I hope he succeeds.”

“I’m not allowed to take offence there, am I?”

The corners of the Composer’s mouth twitched. “No.” She rested her cup on a roof tile, let the frost creep up the sides and cement it in place. “I’ve said all that I came here to say, so I'd be best be off, but for one question.”

“Hm?”

“Does he know it’s you?”

The Observer’s attention wavered, and he shook his head. “I don’t ever remember meeting anyone important from the Cloak, other than you. He thinks you-” a blank stare “-he thinks Scout got pulled out of reality by another Grandmaster, and is fighting in another battle somewhere.”

“...Keep it that way. I’m not risking infighting just to extradite him, but he’s owed that much.” The Composer uncoiled gently, drifting in something that wasn’t quite a direction. Observer took the hint and stood up to see her off.

“So,” he said, a little hesitant, “I’m forgiven then? I don’t have to spend every conscious moment waiting for a knife in my back?”

“You have a colleague’s word that I won’t interfere.” The Composer stood, disintegrating like a stray vortex of wind, a genuine, arctic smile. “Forgiveness, though? Observer, I’ll forgive you when you’re dead.”

She vanished with a hiss and a howl, leaving Observer alone on the rooftop holding an empty cup. He wasn’t rightly sure whether that had gone well or not.

Jen set down her coffee and found herself in pain—excruciating, intimate, innately familiar pain.

It was not that she had ever had her wrist and shoulder twisted in precisely this way before, or even really that she had ever spent more than a few minutes in the company of her attacker. But this was the dark and exciting antithesis of love-at-first-sight, a relationship fully-formed at the dawn of destiny. She knew this touch. She knew this pain. She knew this hatred.

“Hallo, Jen,” said Kath.

Jen replied by way of an agonized gasp that she hoped managed to sound contemptful and dismissive. Then she grabbed for her sword with her left hand.

Kath whirled her around, put a hand against her collar and threw her onto the table, pinning both arms beneath her. Jen kicked out with both feet. Kath pirouetted away from the kick, picked up Jen’s coffee mug and casually overturned it into her eyes.

Jen screamed.

Kath upended the table with a shrug and knelt over Jen, producing a length of green rope from her purse. A waiter moseyed over to clean up the spilled coffee. The other guests enjoyed their beverages and checked their pocket watches in anticipation of the day to come. Above the arches and decorative hammocks of the cafe the cobalt-molasses of the morning had sharpened to the yellow-white-blue of midday in Eddelin. It was just getting warm enough to trigger the deployment of a dozen or so twirling parasols on the streets below. Jen’s hands were bound.

“Not killing you yet,” reassured Kath, tightening the binds on her wrists. “Just a reminder of my—” a strange gesture and lilt over the word “my” left Jen thinking she’d missed a fish pun “—inevitability.” She indicated her fingernails, painted coral green. “Call hallo at your death, Jen.”

Jen kicked out again and caught a foot to the ankle—a bare foot with a stomp that hit like a stiletto heel. “Fuck y—“

A swift kick to the cheek left a tic tac toe pattern of red on Jen’s face. Not quite bare, those feet, as much as Kath had that ability to look naked in anything. Fishnet stockings. Of course. “Shhh,” sounded Jen’s captor, tracing a glyph of St. Elmo’s fire with her fingertips. “Silent now.” The glyph dispersed. Jen tasted something in her throat like a cough drop.

Kath jerked the rope and pulled Jen to her feet. “Down into the murky green quiet with you,” she added. “I think you know this spell.” Flashes of green light in the air between them disrupted the sunbeam outlining the mermaid's shoulder. “Maybe float around town, catch a show.”

And Kath melted into the crowd.

Somebody stepped on and over Jen’s sternum. She tried to scream, found she couldn’t, and dragged herself under a table. The spell the mertwat had cast had would make her invisible, inaudible, and generally easy to ignore, which was an inconvenient condition when involuntary. Especially with her hands tied. She grabbed a knife off of someone’s table and made to cut herself free, but the green rope didn’t so much as fray.

Discarding the knife, Jen hopped over the fence to the alley beside the café and attempted to shimmy up a storm drain. With her hands tied it took her nearly a minute to awkwardly shimmy up thirty feet to the rooftop. She collapsed to the shinglery and lay looking up at the sky for the space of three breaths before picking herself up. The shadow of a cloud drifted lazily over central Eddelin. From above—even a scant few stories above—the city reminded her of a Spanish painting, or her idea of what Spanish painting was like. It had a palette.

Jen scowled. If she had her voice she could run a rough locator incantation for Kath, but as it stood she had only hate as her compass. And good old-fashioned deductive reasoning, she supposed. Why wasn’t she dead? Kath wasn’t a supervillain; she was ultimately too pragmatic to run a long campaign of demoralization and torture if she could end it shortly. Her first thought was that she was being goaded, that Kath needed her for something in particular. But, comfortingly egocentric as that notion was, it didn’t hold up: Kath’s control had been complete enough a few seconds ago that it was hard to imagine any goal she couldn’t have forced Jen into. The beating and curse were a diversion, then—a stalling tactic. So long as Kath was in Eddelin, searching for whatever she was searching for, Jen would eventually have found her, so she wanted to get Jen first. Crippling and cursing her, probably gaining distance and keeping a peripheral scry on her was a better move than any sort of imprisonment she could muster.

Xadrez.

Getting to Xadrez necessitated keeping Jen alive, given that it was likely impossible to predict what would happen to the spirit if he “won” by way of Jen’s death. Xadrez, for his part, was desperate enough for assistance in his crusade against the Observer that he wouldn’t be inclined to screen powerful allies on the basis of sanity or twatty-twat twattitude fish-smelling… stupid bitchiness.

So chasing Xadrez away probably wasn’t a good idea. Considering that she knew literally no one else in this city. She sat down on the ledge and pulled her new chess piece out of her pocket. The chessmaster had at least afforded her a knighthood, a step down from her former queen (which she had lost… in New Battleopolis? Tor must have gotten it off her).

With a sense of timing that she didn’t think was coincidence—fish eyes always looked to both sides—a Xadrez-o-gram crackled up her arm into her language center.

Should you wish to turn your re-adolescent rage towards more fruitful pursuits

Pang Hall

University East

On the hour

The chess piece didn’t work both ways, of course. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t send a message. She threw the knife down three stories to the ground with a crack. And then spat on the pieces for good measure. Jen, for all her inadequacies, knew how to aim a lugie.

* * * * *

Xadrez didn’t feel the spit, but the cutoff of his link to that particular piece did, somehow, transmit a hint of malice. Maybe just his own sentimentality acting on him.

Kath smirked, tossing her coat over a valet’s shoulder as she passed through the archway, hand on her general’s board. “Private conversation?”

Xadrez winced. Was Kath’s magic-sense so delicate that she could perceive even a rapid-fire communiqué, or had she simply read his face?

Not offering an overture would have been unwise

We want her close

”You were the one storming off ere the quarter hour,” mocked the queen. ”But then you were angrier than frightened. And ultimately always counted on your pet to protect you from, glugluglug, wicked sorts.”

Frankly your highness

One unfortunate complication of your presence in this round is the destabilization of my relations with your predecessor

She is not as

Pragmatic

As yourself

”Do you have accommodations for mer?” Kath asked another usher, touching his face—lightly, playfully tracing out his vulnerable arteries, as only Xadrez (and not even she) seemed to notice. The usher folded his hands over his crotch and pointed up a rounded staircase. Kath licked her lips.

“Fearing me needn’t ashame you.” She ascended the stairs two at a time, backwards, watching Xadrez awkwardly tilt his board up at an angle to follow. “And shame has its own glitter. Mind only that your fear and shame don’t carry you away to destructive irrationalities.” She turned on her toes again, affording Xadrez a disinterested view of her twitching buttocks. ”I know you bear some attachment to your guardian nayad yet, but I can name, hmmm. Six other names she failed to protect. Only one of them my doing.”

At the top of the stairs the hallways opened up to a series of terraced shallows overlooking the lecture stage. The queen’s legs had fused and she was nude save for the circlet before she so much as hit the water.

Xadrez lingered at the top of the stairs. ”Rude of me,” she yawned, not turning back in his direction. ”Do the threads of fate abhor a little water?”

Xadrez dropped himself into the water ungracefully, splashing on the queen’s smiling cheek. Fate does as it must

You don’t really understand her

”I’ve known her body and sword,” responded Kath. ”Only way to acquaint oneself with a maid of her sort is physically. Yours has been a romance of the shallows. You’ve only known what she wants you to know.”

Your suppositions are accumulating, my liege

I only expressed a predilection towards keeping crucial parties within arms reach

In fact I recall having this precise conversation with she-who-we-seem-not-to-be-naming herself not long ago

These tactics of whimsy appear to be a commonality in those of your shared profession

Kath glowered for just a moment before resuming her stance of aloof sensuality. “The difference between me and Jennifer, the first of her name, is that she gets off on losing control of a situation. Whereas you simply can’t fathom a queen whose control extends beyond the length of her tail. I have allies keeping Jen occupied.”

The queen and her general had been among the first, but other attendees were now beginning to fill out the auditorium. Xadrez found himself scanning for suspicious characters, but lacked the cultural context to be able to casually judge people on the basis of clothing and race. Allies

Paranoia was inconveniently taxing and potentially cognitively limiting, but a necessary recourse at this junction.

What allies would those be

And then the three words he least expected to hear from his new comrade:

”People I trust.”

* * * * *

University East it was. For a score to settle and nothing better to do.

Moving along the rooftops of Eddelin with her hands bound proved less difficult than she’d feared. The city had a fairly intuitive spiral geometry and hadn’t yet reached the point of saturation where the rooftops were grappling for control over the third dimension. Everything seemed to be two or three stories, the walls littered with sills and ledges and emergency escape ladders. Jen thanked whatever gods were available that her two recent deaths and resurrections had done nothing to diminish her consistent twelve-foot standing jump height, honed in a four-month retreat in the bog-monasteries of the amphibbelum south.

She was glad that her body still bore the evidence of these memories, but she wasn’t sure about her mind. The old stories were still there—most of them, as many as her brain had room for—but they didn’t feel like anything any more. Maybe it was just the battle, the constant tension and death and chaos. But she could feel that winding down—they’d solved the problem of the past, she was pretty sure, and by extension the problem of the future, which only left the present—and as it receded it had taken something with it. She felt tired and slow and quiet. The only thoughts she could summon that made her happen were killing this merbitch and this city—the sound of music from curtained windows and the smell of coffee… added up to something… something that seemed important. Something that felt and tasted like a future.

Jen hated futures. Something was wrong with her, clearly. Hopefully killing the mertwat would help.

There she was loitering outside the auditorium, fishnet fucking stockings and all, waiting (presumably) for Xadrez. The object of all her hatred and frustration. The knot in her throat and that feeling in her stomach like she’d eaten some bad shellfish. She thought about just diving, wrapping the ropes between her wrists around the bitch’s neck and strangling her nice and slow. Practicality got in the way: she was in no condition to win a fight, and definitely not against Kath in particular. She needed to play this smart.

Smart, but not necessarily graceful.

SpoilerShow

Happy one year of me not having made a post in this, jesus

Also happy approximately-5th birthday, this fucking game

This is Pt 1/2, the latter up when I hopefully sooner rather than later get it finished up

The clock towers about Eddelin began to chime in the new hour, the vague warble of their collective asynchronicity jostling Jen from all sides. A final church bell sang out across the rooftops, better late than never, from Jen’s three o’clock; she turned in its direction and saw Kath perched on a observatory. She caught her breath, clenching her fists and feeling the bite of her restraints around her wrists, before parkouring over the nearest alleyway. Kath, fish-bitch she was, knew better than to try make the leap.

There was a closeness to the air; a small-town drear of inescapability that compelled Jen to run until her lungs burned from anything else. She felt watched. Jen closed her eyes, counted to green, and when that didn’t work counted back down from there to blue. She got halfway when Kath shoved her from behind, a knee in the small of Jen’s back and the faintest huff - too many stairs, too quickly climbed - in the whisper at her ear. Jen screamed until the merqueen slammed her face into the blacktop, hissing something about tied hands and not manatowing to Her Majesty like the rest of them. She fished out a dagger, halting Jen’s obscenities with its prickle on the side of her neck as the maid sought the jugular.

To the casual observer, this would’ve been the indubitable end of Jen the First, and by anticlimactic extension the Battle. Clearly, someone hadn’t factored in how damnable impossible it was to herd cat(h)s.

Unfortunately for this Kath, the Observer was all business (if, admittedly, a filthy casual). Jen noticed him first, and he waited just long enough to catch the mermaid's attention. Kath looked up (squinted a bit, of course the jackass had placed himself with the sun at his back), managed half the supercilious assassin’s laugh reserved for the ghosts of those who'd put up a good struggle, and was promptly disintegrated with a snap of the Observer's fingers.

Jen snatched for the knife, only to find that that too had been blasted, and also her hands were still bound. Damnit. The Observer adjusted his cuffs, indirectly focussing on her in the kind of way that takes practice. Jen, not caring to make an effort to look effortless, merdusted herself off best she could with bound arms and took an unabashed proper look at her saviour. She had little familiarity with 20th-century fashion, but the general estimation of the Observer’s “look” as used-car-salesman found its comfortable way to contempt anyway. He was distinctly reshevelled, and looking back at her as if to prove he could.

"You’re welcome," he pointed out. Jen raised her wrists, a haggle-shrug; the Observer raised a pre-lecture finger and decided instead to give it a twirl. The bindings fell away like sand with a faint coppery scent on the breeze. “You owe me.”

“Fuck off, Serviette,” rubbing at where the ropes had dug in. “You should know good as I do how naked I feel without a sword handy.” The Observer shrugged. “So, does this mean Xadrez gets a free pass as well before the round’s done?”

“That’d be special treatment,” said the Observer, a little too quickly.

“Right, and rescuing a damsel in distress totally counts as affirmative action. If you were looking for some kind of, I don’t know, decisive stunning epic etcetera conclusion between us, you could’ve picked a spot with a bit more gravitas, you know?”

Jen motioned across the rooftops with a hand, gesturing an arc that complemented the understated geometries of Eddelin’s streetplan. A couple final stragglers were wandering into the lecture hall, and Jen imagined for a moment Xadrez, muttering a testy running-down of the clock into asphalt. Beyond the city, Arkal’s world unfolded itself all farmland and borough and ridge and dale, noon-haze lending a sense of distance, of far lands teeming beyond and no place to call the centre of everything.

The Observer wasn’t listening, shielding his eye as he squinted into the still-high sun. “Seriously, if you just want to mulligan this last round, Xadrez couldn’t possibly think any less of you, and I can think of a couple places-”

Jen had a split split second to notice the incoming rush of Magic, slingshotting over the horizon like a comet with a grudge. She had even less time to notice the Observer’s reaction - or lack thereof - and even if she’d wanted to get the jump on him, she didn’t have a weapon to hand.

Like that’d stop her. She lunged, the Observer caught her fist, and time stopped again.

“Really?” he asked, almost amused. “Wait, what the-”

---

Mnemonocyst-class Bio-satellite Verrestra Mare-9 was a couple generations behind being state-of-the-art Bio-wyrm expansionist-kit, orbited by a couple low-security genetic archives and a processing centre for cyst-assisted “printing requests” made accessible for non-Wyrms. The universe it serviced was nothing to write homeworld about, ecologically speaking, which suited the dozen or so wyrmsonnel stationed upon it. A home away from home for a species without a terrific amount of attachment to the whole concept in the first place.

Three wayfaring hominids, a pear, and a prophet walked into a library. It smelt like an old but well-maintained fridge, and laid out in a way mostly amenable to the party’s navigation, other than Sen’s bulk and skittery footing. Holly stood on guard, skeptical and mostly watching Algernon, who was taking a look at the plugs lining the walls (“don’t touch anything”, cautioned Fantha). Jeremy seemed reluctant to follow out of the beige and the trees, though he was still processing the utter lack of repercussions for (and he could feel it, no question) opening a door between universes. Fantha gently headbutted a leathery inset in the wall, peeling Sen’s face off it after a moment.

“Not the universe I asked for, but it appears both dark and live, so it should suffice. Come.” The doormage still balked. “If you’re not going to, close the door, at least. The station’s been alerted to our entrance, and I’ll need the other-”

“Wait, what?”

“No ok I changed my mind I’ve already got enough space worms in my life to deal with”

Fantha rolled Sen’s eyes, made a snap decision, and grew a sapling-switch of World Tree behind Jeremy, slamming it into his back once it bent enough upon some Ovoid protrusion. The doormage collided with Holly, scrambling to his feet just in time for Fantha’s arborisms to swing the door closed again.

Holly flinched. The color drained from Jeremy’s face. Algernon yelped as his worm clenched its teeth on his skull.

Jeremy clawed at the now-handle-less door, heedless of Fantha’s pleas to get back; at some accidental gesture of his it slid up and away, opening into a hallway. A half-dozen insectoids, carapaced police-issue black but large as wolves, flanked the exit. Jeremy froze; gestured the door down and closed again.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Holly. Jeremy slid down the door and into some kind of uncomfortable resting position at its foot, curling up like someone had tossed salt on him.

“I can’t feel the doors,” he mumbled into his knees. Holly wheeled in Fantha’s direction, clenching thin air instead of fire, accusation sublimating into dread with all the frightening normalcy of ice melting.

“I’ll confess, I hadn’t considered that,” Fantha hummed, as the guards burst in.

---

“Your homeworld.” Xadrez looked up from the guest list; Kath had rested her head on the pool’s edge and was admiring the crown-turned-bracelet. Pretending he’d been hearing things, the tactician returned to slicing discs off the end of a handrail, laying out the freshly-arrived-and-seated Mamikonean contingent on his board.

“Any nice bodies there?”

...Avak-yaw was never an easy crossing
persistent rimward currents dragged unwary ships into the wings of Her cloak
Well provisioned they may wander the veil for months
gasp deep lungfuls of ghosts before a beacon on some coast of the Realm might draw them again into the world of the living

The dagger murmured in his fist.

On the day the news came the Kilnkin capital had been overrun by the Legion Witch
you could not see the ocean for the ships
Entire cities fleeing damnation setting sail for the edge of the Realm
not that I can blame them
With Scout erstwhile a warrior’s soul had the slimmest chance of all in finding its way to the Cloak

So

these Mamikoneans-

“You know how these things go,” yawned Kath. “Verdant Queen of the Place one day, High Empress of New Sealand the next.”

Sanjegorian Scrolls, nodded Xadrez.
these Mamikoneans as you called them look well-travelled

Collaborators, then
correspondence spanning this realm

Xadrez looked around for a bookshelf. An atlas, at least. Failing that, checked the lining of his faterobes for some trace of Arkal’s past. Something had been feeling off about this place, like the acoustics were wrong to the point they registered as a flavour, perhaps, instead of a sound. He hauled himself from the pools, sloughed water off the board with a sleeve, flung open the doors back out into the hallway and looked out across the university grounds. Eddelin spread out before Xadrez, curves reclining upon all the wrong axes, invoking existential vertigo.

The Church of Cynisca’s clock began the hourly toll, lulling Koule out of a daze and leaving half a syllable in his throat. Blinking the sun from his eyes, he glanced up from his notes and across the courtyard to Pang Hall’s clock. It told him three more minutes, and the deep gongs of the First Bank fading out across Eddelin confirmed to Koule the same, and homely familiarity in the disorder of the day.

Perhaps, Koule thought to himself, he should go and try living in Nakharis a while; escape his desk and go see the ancient kingdom’s remains firsthand. His contemporaries at West Nakharis (revolutionary discovery or not, Koule was amazed and humbled they’d made the trip for his presentation) had all but arranged a position at their university for him; it occurred to Koule just then that they’d come to seal the deal, hand over a contract personally. Even at conference-size, an hour on a scrying stone would’ve worked out far cheaper than the contingent settling down in the hall, right now.

He’d meant to raise the possibility over lunch with Eselt, and could only hope now that his brother would have a moment between curtain call and the inevitable afterparty. The scholar glanced down at his notes, lingering at the lecture hall’s outward-creeping shadow, running over a particularly troublesome bit of Sanjegorian script aloud. It irked him, the way this particular passage struggled off his tongue. The passage itself was charming in its own right, he supposed, but to Koule more majestic and far more untranslatable was the logical journey he’d set off on - destination unknown at the time - to decipher it, and with it as his entranceway the rest of the Scrolls in turn.

“<and here exalted Golgoriath and her wise counsel ensure/no realm should suffer impotent under gaze indignious coveting fell/but bear it witness their own destinies, seized>”

Xadrez waited at the window until Koule disappeared below, into the lecture hall. No sign of the sword.

Jen was alerted to the world still existing by the Observer’s groan, and the slow fade-out of angelic light (a compromise between the “divine radiance” school of angelic and the “cry of a thousand bells and a trillion eyes and wings and flaming wheels” one). The Observer seemed unfazed, only glowing a little for his troubles. He scratched his head, revealing inscribed a chainlike design of overlapping rings and microscopic script all over his hands, the front and the back, around his wrists and the base of his thumb.

“Well,” he declared, stopping Jen in her tracks as she picked herself up and tried to get the jump on the Grandmaster, “Somebody seems to be of the opinion I’ve overstayed my welcome, so I’d best be off. Good luck not getting killed by any more bit characters, ok?”

He half-waved in departure, took a step out of existence, and existence tore his hands clean off. And his eye.

… No, wait. There they were, down there! That old ice queen must’ve set this up for him, one of those “no hard feelings” type of gifts the Observer like imagining as cornerstone to a healthy professional rivalry. Coming on a bit strong, maybe, what with the amputation going several degrees conceptually deeper than he’d anticipated, even from her. Still, this was fixable, if annoying. Hop back, pause Jen, grab his hands (and his eye), undo the traps, go to the Speakeasy, find a nice cold something in some non-Intersticed nook, and wait for Xadrez to blow up Eddelin. Battles proceed as scheduled and we can all laugh about it like old omnipotent murderfriends at the next funeral, hopefully the Charlatan’s.

The Observer stepped back into Eddelin, and took a closer look at one of the multiplying threads around his hand. His eye was flooded with letters of rejection, arcane syllables to the vague tune of lacking the appropriate permissions. He blinked, and tried again with a different binding. It got about as far as “this d’arcanment is currently in use” before his retinas whitescreened again.

Still registering the pain of dismemberment on some level or another, pseudomnipotence lending enough of an outside perspective for the whole thing to still be vaguely bemusing, the Observer figured it ok to an express an “um,” in the general direction of the nearest remotely-sapient thing that wasn’t him.

The roof was deserted. Light wobbled, queasy, around where the Observer had last seen Jen.

From Jen’s perspective, the Observer almost vanished, something cracked like a pylon falling in fast-forward, and four great spines of light came coursing from the four corners of the globe, converging where the Observer’s eye had been not moments before. Space stretched and snapped back into shape, dragging the Observer back in with it (he almost made it look intentional). He blinked a couple of times, exposing a big, satisfying cross-mark on his eyelid, then finally looked at Jen like he’d been miles away.

Jen grinned, then grinned wider as the Observer raised a hand that didn’t do shit to stop her (it instead flared up with a lot of pretty light, snapping the whole thing in several painful directions at once). She charged - he leapt, a too-small hop through space that clipped his flailing hand into a chimney, which exploded into chunks of masonry - but Jen had better things to do, she ran right past him and cleared the side of the building, eliciting shouts from cityfolk who’d heard the chimney, the rest of the fracas apparently on some plane that didn’t attract their attention. She caught a balcony, fell the rest of the way to the street, lickety-slipped through the gathering crowd and straight for the university.

Pang Hall stood where the City met the college, accorded a respectful distance from other buildings by a wide road on the city side and sweeping lawns on the other. It was altogether too municipal to feel like a castle; in the right light it could’ve been a palace.

The entrance foyer was deserted, an edge and unease that reminded Jen of the day she’d come home from some conquest or another and found her Council of Werelocks in the throne room partway through some usurper’s ritual on the Trifleman. The tiny jester’s guilty pleas made her giggle, easy as had his encouragement to take a vacation and take over a neighboring kingdom in strife. Little wordsmith he’d been.

She opened the door a crack and scanned the hall, spotting Koule well underway on the stage but no prominently insubstantial silhouette. There were a bunch of booths overhanging the lecture hall seating - the like you’d figure in a theatre - which seemed more her ghost-general’s style. Jen found a way up, glanced behind her and found no man, mer, or grandmaster in pursuit, then vaulted the stairs two at a time.

“Xadrez! Xadrez!”

---

Backstage, unsurprisingly, had been full of well-wishers and familiar faces, several of which Koule had only properly examined in picto-transcripts - like the thick-bearded Vice-Chancellor (prior to the administrative position, forefront in the field of Archival Dungeoneering) with her handshake that could crush an ink vial. Retired lecturers had turned up, even Ransk of Gulespoor who ran the scrivener’s he used to work at over the summer. It took Koule a lot of rushed apologies and thank yous and yes-see-you-thens to get up on the stage, until Cedarsap, the university’s projectionist, collared him as politely as a half-elf could.

“Oh. Hesod.” Koule, by habit of the last couple of minutes, extended a handshake; the lightwright somehow turned it into a fistbump. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, no, all your slides loaded in as you asked.” The looming projectionist flashed his teeth, and a small ball of light from his fingertip. “Good of you, no pictures to render, done in my sleep, all black-on-white and easy work. Good crowd for you though, Koule. Not just us usual nose-in-bookers.”

Koule followed Hesod’s catlike glance, in the general direction of his audience. Someone guffawed, but the noise didn’t feel all that out of place.

“Right, that’d be my brother, Eselt.” Koule almost sounded apologetic, before catching himself. “He brought his entire theatre troupe along. I suppose I’d best give them a show, right, Hesod?”

“Them yes, and the mariner up in the galleries too.”

“A mer? I have seen rather a few around town today…” Koule frowned, like something was off, and the half-elf clapped an encouraging hand on his shoulder. With his other, he waved down the hall lights, leaving the lectern invitingly lit in centre stage.

“You’ll be fine, yes. They’ll be on your every word easy. You’ll captivate all them, friend, ‘lockers and mockerbirds, bookers and mers.”

“Thanks, Hesod.”

---

“Ladies, gentlemen, distinguished guests-”

“Ah, finally.”

“It’s a real honor to be opening this conference, and I’d like to thank you all for coming, from almost all corners of the globe. If I may, I’d like to dedicate this in - to my father.” The crowd rumbled. “An explorer, an innovator, a man who in a lot of ways was more like a figure of legend, or-” the scholar huffed a compromise betwixt a sigh and a laugh “-one of the more unhurried forces of nature.” One of Eselt’s crew started to applaud, before someone stopped him.

Hesod’s projector clicked, a classical illustration (black and white, for the lightwright’s convenience) of some far-flung, exotic utopia. It got a chuckle from the academics, a pop-science classic as historically sound as Venusian jungle.

“The last of the Enchanted Courts, the lost kingdom of Sanjegoria, endures through cultures the world over as a symbol of peace, progress, and a place considered almost too good to be true. As you’d expect, there’s much mystique and mythos in the court’s unexplained disappearance, and for centuries we had only the spotty records from other nations and their interactions with Sanjegoria. For the longest time, the eminent primary source about the Court’s nature was thanks to the Gilded Period’s Yule Byren, Ambassador of the Fifth Court of Ralthagon-” -click-flick- “who recorded his experiences as an emissary to the Enchanted Court. This lent us an approximate location of Sanjegoria-” -click-flick, a modern world map, a central-continent splash of grayscale helpfully circled- “somewhere in present-day Barrensands, under jurisdiction of the Mamikonean Octarchy.”

“Sanjegorilogy as a scholarly discipline began in earnest about twenty years ago, when archaeo-historians were rocked by the unearthing of verified Sanjegorian ruins during the biennial desert explorations conducted by Nakharis West. While there’s a whole ‘nother rich glut of history to be found in the far-flung - and, often, farfetched - claims staked by self-styled heirs and descendants of the lost court, I believe Magus Gossh-Breen will be telling us more about that in their afternoon presentation.” One of the swaddled-up Mamikoneans waved.

“Save some space on that table of yours,” Kath cautioned to Xadrez, who glanced up from his disc with a twitch of irritation. “If you want to stage a world war here, wait until after we’ve cleaned up.”

I was not-

“Hush.”

“While “Sanjegorian Scrolls” refers to all of the written works recovered from Nakharis West’s dig sites, it popularly refers to the thirty-eight assorted wyrmskin scrolls unearthed from Structure Six, Site Two. These seized the global imagination as a linguistic portal to greater understanding of the lost Court. To this day, they’re still a point of fascination for conspiracy theorists - or linguists and scholars like myself who grew out of being conspiracy theorists.”

Another slide, of something grainy and pockmarked with the visual noise of copies upon copies. The text - a generous term for it, looping diagrams and little sketches enmeshed within, a dense flowchart more like abstract art - blossomed outward from no particular point on the page. Xadrez saw Kath smirk out of the corner of one eye, but Xadrez was already feverishly copying.
“As you can see-” Xadrez hissed as Koule worked the projector, filigree-dense pages flashing by too fast “-the Scrolls can be roughly grouped into three categories based on appearance - eleven mostly-similar patterns, Type A, eleven more that seems to follow this pattern, Type B, and Type C, the miscellany, for the sixteen scrolls which have little in common with each other.”

“That’s a disparagingly brief history of the discoveries that lead into my field of study. The current name for it is Cryptic Linguistics - my colleagues’ naming choice, not mine, I swear - but you’d be half-right calling me any of a Sanjeographer, Graphemic Theorist, Classical Anullexographer, or even a Softcore Epigraphist.” Someone in the crowd whooped, probably wherever Eddelin East’s head of Geologology had seated themselves. “Thanks, Guigneiss.”

“Sanjegorilogy is a far more interdisciplinary study than popular culture would lead you to believe, far beyond its two mainstay stereotypes-” click-flick, a collage of cartoons, from campus publications and children’s books for the most part, illustrating- “-historically inaccurate trap-dodging dungeoneers, and conspiracy-theorist cryptographers slaving over texts by torchlight.”

“Like you! Yow!”

“Yes, thank you, Guigneiss, like me. For the newcomers in the crowd - and do stop us scholars today if we veer into technical language too sharply - I should note it’s a particularly rare honor a linguist like myself be keynote speaker for the symposium. My name is Koule, I’ve travelled here from Sidant University, and today, I’m here to share with you the fruits of a five-year collaboration - what we believe to be a definitive, if currently-incomplete, deciphering of the Sanjegorian Scrolls. Now, as I hope to show you, the quirks of Sanjegorian orthography makes it quite difficult to immediately use what we’ve found in other excavated texts, but some of my colleagues will be talking later on the potential avenues-”

Xadrez half-wheeled just enough to give Kath his gloweringest profile. I do wonder your majesty
is a lecture hall’s worth of pontifications upon some dead kingdom’s ledgery truly the best use of our time
Did you seek dulcet witterings as mere backdrop to our intensely conversing
even
dare I suggest it
a heart to heart
mutually assured cardiac clawings-at
vying to see who interrogates their way past the sternum first

The chessmaster smoothed the front of his robes down, one hand still scribbling with knife all the while. He turned back to the lecture, ignoring the slam of a door.

It was a joke, your highness
in case I was somehow unclear

“Xadrez! Something happened to the Observer and oh my fucking god you have got to be joking-”

Kath waved, flicking it into a throat-slitting movement with the kind of practiced seamlessness you only get through life with two sets of lower body. “That’s a nice look for you, Jennifer.”

Xadrez spun around properly this time, giving Jen his longest-suffering look before returning to Koule’s talk of gerunds and grammar.

What of her

I sent her an invitation to this lecture
though she’d have an even more wilting view on all this scroll-gazing than I
For all his enthusiasm the man below has eyes and words only for his deskbound adventures in code cracking

At this rate I’ll decipher those scrolls myself before he reads a single line off them

Kath’s possessions (sword, whip, pouch, pelt) were heaped at the edge of the pool, maybe three paces from Jen. Grabbing the sword before Kath could swim over was a dicey proposition, and Xadrez’ knife would make short work of it even if she did. The mertwat was looking at Xadrez (trying to wrap his head around Koule’s explanations of “circumferential clause separation”) with an expression like Yuletide had come early.

“Xadrez, you better be fucking listening, something happened to the Observer and I think he’s-”

Behind her, the Grandmaster sprang into being, incandescent and murderous. The streams of text had multiplied, searing and straining against his every movement. Xadrez flinched, but it was at some exposition of Koule’s; he took the obstinate time to commit his thoughts to disc-paper before finally addressing the commotion behind him.

I thought your allies were tasked with distracting her, not-

The Observer waved a hand, which only served to throw shadows across the water. By this point frustrated, he dug the fingers of his left hand into the mess of runes engloving his right, peeling away the abjurations as Kath threw up her own.

Jen got a glimpse of scorched and blackened digits, their skin already regenerated back in the instant it took for the Observer to join them in a snap-

---

The thespian portions of Koule’s audience were, by this point, mostly asleep. Eselt still seemed attentive, though, and the academics were all nodding along, so Koule wasn’t bothered. There was a strange light coming from the mer’s gallery, a glow like a familiar face - the face of someone he knew next to nothing about, save for their intercession into his life being nothing but good.

Then the light exploded, taking a chunk of terrace with it. If any actors slept through that, the Vice Chancellor’s yell as plaster, water, and a mer fell on her in quick succession did the job just fine. Hesod was stage left in a flash, restoring the lights a little too fast, throwing the hall into even more disarray. Koule, mental brakes still squealing, felt the wash of magic as the half-elf, too slow, yelled his name in warning.

Time didn’t freeze, but it did slow down to the point you’d need a god’s eyes to notice the difference. The Observer took a deep breath, strode past Jen and over the water to the now-empty robe as it dangled off a bit of rubble. Black shards of rock glittered under(sigil-bound)foot.

“Well,” said the Observer, “congratulations, Jennifer Tull! Being the second-most dangerous immediate threat to my existence, you’ve survived and won the Grand Battle!”

Jen couldn’t actually turn to look at the Grandmaster, caught as she’d been mid-lunge for Kath’s sword. The last of the water in the lower pools trickled out, and miles away a projector clicked over. “Seriously, great effort. Like you said, it’s a real shame we couldn’t have something a bit more climactic, but what can you do, right?”

“I guess there’s All-Stars, if you’re still keen for that sort of thing by the time that rolls around. Oh, right! There’s an All Stars. Awesome of me to tell you.”

The Observer waved at the Eddelinites below. Xadrez’ knife was sticking out from under some debris, and he gingerly pulled it free with two fingers. The faterobes’ glow was fading, dull against the angry white-gold mesh of light around the Grandmaster. It also seemed the sort of thing he shouldn’t leave lying around, so the Observer picked that up, too.

“Not to fret - I’ve got your back, seeing as you’re now my champion and all. No need to thank me! You’ll have plenty of time to yourself before all that happens. Now, I’ve got a bit of spellery to untangle before I can send you home, so sit tight and wait until I’ve got everything arranged.”

Jen was about a centimetre closer to the sword. At this rate, she might actually manage to nab it before he was done talking. The Observer was playing the crowd, giving Kath a friendly warning that they really should stop running into each other, tossing the knife Xadrez’ knife into the air and catching it, its glint in the corner of her eye the only thing Jen could actually perceive.

A piece of stone, black as rage, shifted under the Observer, sending more wreckage askitter. He fumbled the knife, almost dropping it over the edge, but something grabbed it.

The threads of fate twitched, the obsidian shards rose from the floor, and something brought the dagger down, carving a bloodless path through gold thread and teal thread and clean through to an entity made of anything but flesh.

The Observer staggered back.

His power, straining as it had against the cursive cursework, burst gleeful forth at the break in the lines - but so too did his essence. The intact inscriptions about him clenched, the broken chessboard’s fragments drifting together, filling out the discarded robe. His time-stop wavered at the shock, granting everyone a disorienting two seconds of unleashed momentum, Jen seizing the sword out of the corner of his eye.

Severed threads of magic curled up, but not rendered inert - they tensed, and the Observer could tell they were waiting for one more intrusive excuse in their reality to burrow into his fresh chest-hole.

Glaring at the hovering knife, a fist twitching in spite of all good sense to see if Jen would be more amenable to disintegration, the Observer stripped a hand clean of sigilry and snapped his fingers. He vanished.

The gold mesh lingered in the air like a lacy skeleton; Jen managed to run over and stab it before it, too, vanished in pursuit.

Jen and what must’ve been Xadrez looked at each other, as the audience lurched back into (com)motion downstairs. The fragmented disc eventually settled into another hovering upper boy, though no individual chip kept still within those confines.

“So,” Jen eventually began, not even sure if the ghost could acknowledge her. “Breaking your disc doesn’t kill you. Good to know.”

Wrong
I think

No
I definitely drifted off there for a moment

I believe
my state of existence
simply appears to have fallen outside the Observer’s purview

Realisation dawned on Jen. “You signed your fucking. soul. to sea-Satan. She-Satan.”

I’ll admit
It wasn’t that bad

I anticipated some dread of failure like I had my on my first deathbed
maybe a flashback or two
But
truthfully
some small part of me was content at the prospect
to be free of all the compounding obligations
to leave it all in the hands of you and Her Majesty

“But now your undying soul is cursed for-fucking-ever to serve her. Great job, Xadrez. Your forefront commitment to killing the Grandmasters instead of preserving your own hide is truly commendable.”

to the Crown, actually, Xadrez hummed. He tried rapping his fingers on his board, but his arm just kind of dangled instead. Honestly

I go following in your allegiance-pledged footsteps every which way at once
let the door hit death on my way out
strike a tangible a blow on our captor
and you’re still impossible to please, Jennifer Tull

Jen nearly rolled her eyes clean out of her skull. The knife whimpered.