Sebastian Pop

A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - November 2025 Update

Will be published in everywhere else in two par

A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - October 2025 Update

A day in the limedark, so to speak.

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Weeks in the Past, but Not that Many

Hell

He was lounging with his head hanging off the arm of the couch when the voices out in the hallway drew close enough to become intelligible.

“- my words make you uncomfortable, oh Lord of Vampires? Remind you of the grand boasts you used to make?”

He idly swirled the wine in his glass while gauging the motions of the canvases floating high up near the ceiling.

“Bold words from the one who calls himself a soothsayer but didn’t see a single sign in advance that Hades was going to betray us – I thought you were supposed to see the future? I’ve half a mind to suspect that you conspired with him yourself!”

He’d watched the canvases plenty enough before and they never deviated from their looping roaming, but that was no longer the case.

“How dare you? Unlike everyone here, I never claimed that Starsend Moment was full proof, my conscience is clear, unlike yours!”

The pulse of energy had disturbed the canvases and set them on new flight and spinning paths, when the boy he’d borrowed from the Patsy Faction finally figured out how to do what he’d been brought here for.

“Ha! A devil preaching about conscience, and a Pillar at that! I have to hand it to you, Asmodeus, I consider myself an even-tempered man, it takes a lot to get under my skin, but congratulations – on any other day you might have managed to make me laugh!”

“Now now, my lords, remember decorum, we are all in Lord Lucifer’s house now.”

“Ugh, your servility is as disgusting as ever, Lucifuge.”

“I do only what is expected of me, Lord Beezlebub.”

“Unless you’re anywhere but here, don’t think we don’t know what you did to the dark horse of the last Rating Games, you owe me a mutation piece for that.”

“I must disavow any such claims, lady Leviathan, the wagers made by others with others are none of my business.”

“Careful, all I’m hearing is that I have no choice but to resort to the old way of settling things.”

“And all I’m hearing is you being a sore loser.”

“Nobody asked for your opinion, vampire.”

“When I need permission to do anything it won’t be you I ask for it, you…”

The so-called Impaler trailed off. Nobody said anything else either. The fools had finally gotten around to looking around the room they’d just walked into. Terrible situational awareness, that.

Truly, only three things were better than living in luxury: stealing that luxury from someone else, keeping that someone else around to gloat at, and having all your entertainment brought straight to you without having to put any effort. “Don’t mind little old me,” Rizevim Livan Lucifer said with practiced indolence, tossing a pomegranate seed into his mouth. “I’m just providing today’s venue after all. Please, act as if I’m not here.”

He didn’t mean a word of it, and everyone knew it. Rizevim knew they knew it, and he made sure they knew he knew that they knew. What would they do? Take him at face value, or not?

Both, it turned out. Some played along, some pretended to play along, Tepes scoffed as if nobody could see it for the pure bravado it was. None of them were able to pretend indifference at the sight behind Rizevim. He could see the questions burning inside them, but they were too skittish to actually come out and ask. All in all, a full gamut of reactions and thus more entertainment for him.

The room they were in was actually a painter’s atelier, inside a manor which Rizevim had had ripped wholesale out of the ground in Paris, a little while back. Transporting it to the Underworld had been quite the adventure, especially since he wanted to keep it intact. Happily, Grauzauberer had provided ample manpower to perform the teleportation. The fact Rizevim had to bully that upstart Mephisto into providing the necessary magicians made the affair all the sweeter.

Almost sweet enough to make up for the annoyance of having to put so much effort into getting the translocation done entirely from the Overworld, and thus without those four, even bigger upstarts getting wind of it. They surely would’ve, if he’d sourced casters from this side instead.

Rizevim wasn’t afraid of the Four Usurpers in the least of course, but if he wanted his life to be full of hassles he’d have fought in the Civil War instead of sitting by.

Euclid Lucifuge had founded Nilrem largely to ensure they wouldn’t need to outsource expertise like that again, but Rizevim sometimes wished Lucifuge had created his magician organization earlier. Only a little, though. Getting Euclid to report on all the different ways he tried and failed to subvert his unwitting sister’s own patsies had been the highlight of Rizevim’s weekends for the entirety of the past century.

Lucifuge had been having slightly more success than before at that, though, finally. It had played some small part in Rizevim offering to provide this new meeting venue for the leadership of Khaos Brigade, now that the one in the Dimensional Gap had been destroyed by Hades. If his old entertainment was drying up, he had to get something to fill that time slot.

Despite all that, he’d been half expecting this wouldn’t pay off anyway. He wasn’t one to second guess himself, but it was hard not to doubt this pack of shlemiels. To his amazement, though, the vampire’s rants proved much more engaging than Rizevim expected.

“He must be hunted down immediately!” Marius Tepes pounded his fist on the table as he ended his progress report on the upset in Romania. “Him and those upstarts who helped him, they must be found and made an example of, and my sister returned post haste! I trust I don’t have to spell out how much of a setback it is to lose Sephiroth Graal, I expect all of your cooperation on this!”

“That certainly sounds compelling,” Katerea Leviathan said in a dry tone so overdone that everyone could tell she was just pretending indifference. The tall bespectacled woman always showed off her figure too much when she was rattled, it wasn’t her most obvious tell but it was the most amusing. If her skin wasn’t so damn tan Rizevim might have taken her to bed, but it just didn’t do it for him when paired with that hair. Rizevim could forgive the drab brown, but that bun was such low effort – pretending she didn’t feel inferior to her usurper in looks was all dandy, but there was such a thing as overcompensating on overcompensating. “But I fail to see how that’s any responsibility of ours. Aren’t you the one who refused to let anyone else get anywhere near that girl?”

“To all our loss, it seems,” Euclid remarked. “I understand wanting to protect your research, but it seems to have backfired in this case.”

“Bah,” Tepes scoffed. “As if you actually got anywhere with the Progenitor before he got stolen from under your nose.” The bat man looked pointedly at Shalba Beelzebub, and when the latter only grit his teeth he settled down, no entertainment value at all, that one. “Anyone you sent would’ve done even worse anyway.” So saying, Tepes reached into his coat and pulled out a sealed case of lead over silver, which he opened to reveal another sealed case made of lead over silver, and then a third case out of that which he opened to-

The room’s air turned hot. The leaders of the Old Satan faction all jumped away from the table with exclamations of hissing pain. Rizevim blinked fast, eyes seeing spots.

Marius Tepes shut the case back closed. The holy energy didn’t stop seeping out until the case was back inside the case inside the bigger case. When Marius Tepes shoved it back in his pocket, he looked pained, but not as much as the Old Satans.

Rizevim sat up. He was still seeing spots. His face – his skin…

That holy power had actually warmed him a little.

“What in Lucifer’s name was that?” snarled Shalba Beelzebub, his long hair all askew.

“Scrap metal,” Tepes rasped, then cleared his throat to speak normally again. “From what used to be a sports car. Bastard was in it for less than ten minutes and left it a complete wreck. A wreck that we’ve had to rely entirely on our thralls to move and render down, because no vampire other than me and my elite can get closer than three meters without experiencing what you just did.”

My word, that was quite the little deterrent to unwanted advances. Was that a subtle warning not to double cross him now that he was no longer useful? Pulling that out would certainly ensure he had every chance to escape, Rizevim approved! Not enough to forgive the insult the vampire represented for embodying devil traits better than the devils themselves, but extracting retribution for that was clearly beyond the others, and Rizevim just didn’t feel like getting up. He’d gone from seeing spots to seeing implications…

“That is impossible,” said Creuserey Asmodeus, retaking his seat at the table a tad more warily than earlier. The red highlights on his black clothes were a bit less dark than earlier, and his cape was gray along the hems whereas it had been completely black before. “Unless it was no mere human at all. Such intense holy energy is not entirely unheard of, but as a by-product of mere exposure?”

“None but the higher angels themselves have ever achieved such a thing,” finished Beelzebub. “Them and… Is Heaven moving again?”

And Grandfather himself, thought Rizevim. But it’s not like life could ever take such an interesting turn, could it?

“That’s preposterous,” Leviathan scoffed. “The only moves ‘Heaven’ takes against anyone these days are the people we send to make it look like it.”

“Perhaps they’ve wizened up,” Asmodeus offered. “They’re not completely lacking in pattern recognition – maybe they just didn’t move directly, as usual.”

Tepes slouched in his seat. “You think they gave Hades something to make him turn on us?”

“Ridiculous,” Beelzebub stroked a bee crawling along his collar. “Divide and Conquer isn’t in Heaven’s playbook. Those glowing fools would fall the moment they even considered skullduggery, they’d never risk it.”

Would they? Rizevim hoped not, he could think of a whole bunch of things that should’ve made them fall since Grandfather’s death. Also, Hades turning on them out of nowhere had given him an adrenaline boost like nothing else had in the past two centuries. It was the first time he regretted not actually doing anything as part of this conspiracy that insisted it couldn’t exist without him. Dare he hope something even better might be coming along?

“No vampire can even touch that wreckage without going weak in the knees,” Tepes reasserted his point. “Worse, our thralls keep having their domination broken whenever they do, some have gone so far as to cling to the remains and refused to detach from them, even while being whipped! After we put chained collars on them, they started cutting their wrists on the sharp edges in an attempt to commit suicide rather than return to their previous lives. I’ve had to hire independent human contractors and refrain from using any sort of hypnosis on them just to have it moved before it caused a thrall revolt. A fucking car wreck!”

“That sounds like more trouble than some of the more famous holy relics out there,” remarked Beelzebub. “Some real Shroud of Turin nonsense.”

“You think that’s bad? The night club in Timisoara is all hallowed ground now! And the way he escaped me...” Tepes looked about to tear into someone’s neck just from rage, but he abruptly forced himself still. “I expect you to help me come up with new options.”

“This can’t be a coincidence,” Leviathan stated the obvious, that wet fish. Or not so wet anymore, her skin was even darker now, bet she regretted wearing such a low-cut dress to this meeting, the new tan lines on those breasts and legs were going to be murder on her social life. “First Hades turns on us and then this happens the very next day? Since when do the Greeks have holy power like this?”

“They don’t,” said Euclid. “Apollon used to, but he lost it to Him a long time ago. I suppose we can’t rule out Helios, but that doesn’t really say much.”

“Accursed mythics,” Beelzebub spat. “They just love lording history over us, don’t they?”

“Though no devil has yet died of old age, our species is young compared to most others out there,” Lucifuge grimly agreed. “There are blind spots in our knowledge of things before. We’re not even sure if daylight is inimical to our species because of qualities inherent in sunlight, or if those properties just get imbued into it by Heaven’s System.”

What’s this? Did Euclid just skirt around insulting Lucifer himself?

“Impossible to us, at least,” Asmodeus mused, tapping his fingers on the table. Which was also a shade lighter than before, where Tepes sat. “Perhaps it’s time we extended our patronage, as we previously discussed.”

Beelzebub tsked. “No, I am still opposed. It would be a curse upon the Underworld. I don’t care about the devils who declined us, but to hand our birthright to a foreign creature? And a dragon at that!”

“What’s the matter, Shalba?” Katarea taunted. “Abandoning our ways when it’s inconvenient?”

“If strength was really all that mattered, Leviathan, we would’ve submitted to Him from the start, our sire himself would never have rebelled.”

Good grief, how bold!

“Strength? Him?” Leviathan scoffed. “Strength that He used to make prop-ups and crutches for the weakest species on the planet? If you go and waste your strength on that, it may as well not exist.”

“As opposed to bowing to a dragon?” Beelzebub scowled in distaste. “Even He had only hate in His heart for them, and honestly, I can see His point.”

“A dragon who actually provided proof of power before actually expecting us to bow, instead of expecting blind faith.” Leviathan refused to drop it. “The new world order cannot dawn without a new god at its head, why not the Dragon of Infinity? It’s fine if it’s just a symbol, isn’t it? The laws and the doctrine will be constructed by us.”

“Will they?” Asmodeus grunted. “Hades cost us our only bargaining chip.”

The base in the Dimensional Gap had only been possible thanks to the Ophis Snake that the Dragon of Infinity had given them as a token of what could be, but the use they put it to was entirely a Khaos Brigade accomplishment. Dimension Lost had played an essential role in setting the foundation, but everything else was devil work, down to substituting the Sacred Gear’s power for that of the Ophis Snake, and subsequently reverse-engineering the dimension creation process so they could potentially replicate it without the Sacred Gear at all. Even Rizevim could admit that was a masterstroke of craftsmanship on the part of Shalba and Euclid.

It all was supposed to be a proof of concept that Khaos Brigade actually could help Ophis retake the Dimensional Gap from Great Red, which was her one and only goal for allying with anyone. It would even have served to leverage a more equal partnership rather than vassalage.

All ruined now because Hades decided to turn on them out of nowhere. All when they hadn’t done more than talk about freeing Kronos from Tartarus, even.

“This is all very riveting,” Tepes clicked his tongue in distaste. “But unless one of you has figured out an entirely new way to overcome the Dragon of Dreams – which would make patronage by its lesser kin redundant, I might add – we can’t fulfill our end of that bargain anyway. That was the whole point of my research, I’ll remind you.”

“I’ll handle it.”

The vampire and Old Satans all blinked and turned to Rizevim in astonishment.

“Whoever this mysterious homewrecker his, I guarantee he’s not going to lay low for long. Since you’ve failed to even begin figuring out how to start tracking him, we’ll just let him act first. When he does, I’ll drop by to apply the necessary corrective measures, if you follow me.”

Rizevim was never going to submit to anyone regardless, if he were so inclined he would’ve taken sides during the Civil War. But now he’d have to pretend to submit to that autistic loli-serpent, which wasn’t his idea of a pleasant hobby. If he didn’t still lack half the Holy Relics, he might have gone and released Trihexa right now just from spite.

For the first time in a long time, someone had made it so none of Rizevim’s low-effort options were entirely pleasant. Rizevim was going to make Hades pay for that most of all.

The others all just looked at him, then back at each other, so Rizevim snapped his fingers with enough magical force to conjure a small thunderclap. “People, when I said to act as if I’m not actually here, I didn’t actually mean it.”

“Apologies, sire,” Euclid gave a bow. “We are merely surprised you would bother yourself with such a middling issue.”

“That’s because you don’t know all I know.” Which was nothing in this case, dare he hope one of them called his bluff so he had a reason to put them in their place? No, they weren’t dumb enough to do it, more’s the pity. “In the meantime, why don’t you come up with something actually useful? Besides prostrating to another higher power as if I’m not right here in the room with you.”

The Old Satans fell over each other to bow and beg pardon, which Rizevim waved off just so he could decide later if he’ll play it as acceptance or contempt. If you didn’t leave others obsessing over your actions, you weren’t fit to be called a devil.

“With Hades gone, all our agreements with him are void, aren’t they?” The vampire pondered. “Written and implied.”

The devils looked at each other.

The meeting continued with the Old Satan descendants giving their own, half-incomplete updates that were as much intelligence exchange as they were power plays. It was all eminently dull, so Rizevim tuned it all out until they were ready to leave.

“Hey Marius,” Rizevim called just as his guests were getting up. “Leave that scrap metal here. I’m gonna play around with it a while.”

“… Fine.” The vampire took the box and dropped it on the table. “I have more anyway.”

On him, or at home?

The devils didn’t start a fight to find the answer, more’s the pity.

Finally, they left.

None of them had come out and asked what in the abyss the whole deal was with what Rizevim had behind him, more’s the pity.

Rizevim glanced at the boy standing in front of the large canvas with one arm out and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. Devils were incapable of astral projection, it was the small price they paid for being a fused existence from birth, a perfect unification of flesh and spirit instead of the hodgepodge of moving parts that humans were.

Watching him now, Rizevim lamented lost opportunities. Despite all the effort he went through to set it up, the boy hadn’t come out of his trance when the Old Satan leaders could see him, and he could see them in turn. Thereby finding out in the most dramatic way, possible that he and his fool friends had long since been duped into becoming the patsies of the same creatures they thought themselves aligned against. Rizevim would greatly have enjoyed the resulting histrionics, but alas, it was not to be.

“The vampire did not reveal everything,” Euclid reported to Rizevim after the others were completely gone from his property. “The damage to the grounds and the loss in manpower has left some holes in the security of the Vampire Forest that my familiars were able to exploit. I was also able to insinuate one of my Nilrem among the independent contractors he mentioned. The teleportation circle couldn’t have been how the infiltrator escaped, it was incomplete. But what was there was actually better than what Nilrem’s own knowledge of rituals could have attained.

“More important to the matter at hand, it would have taken days to write for a single person, or weeks, even months if it was done in small bits and pieces to prevent discovery. Doing it beneath the upper surface of the soil added a considerable layer of difficulty as well. This speaks to either stealth capabilities superior to anything we have, or long-term infiltration possible only with high-level traitors in the vampires’ own highest echelons.”

“So little Spikey Boy can’t even control his own court.” Rizevim laughed. “How precious! Good on him for not admitting it I suppose, and shame on those three for not seeing through it. I swear, you just can’t get good help nowadays.”

“As you say, sir.”

“Go on, get on with you before the kid wakes up.”

“Very well, sir.”

Soon, Euclid Lucifuge had also left the grounds, and Rizevim was left with no other way to fill time than drawing rude gestures and third legs over the paintings in the manor. He’d already done that to all the ones in the atelier itself, so he was working on thoroughly debasing the ones in the den now.

He had just finished adding the good old testicular torsion to the painting of the black wall thing, when he felt the change in the magical energies of the atelier.

He shifted into his false persona and arrived to greet the brat just as he awoke from his astral projection in the canvas.

“Well?”

“It’s completely useless,” the boy said with utter disgust as he dispelled the barrier he’d used Dimension Lost to put around his body, to keep it safe while he was gone.

Rizevim fancied he could still break through, but only with brute force – his Sacred Gear Canceller didn’t work on the boy once that barrier was up. It had been a most fascinating conundrum until Euclid figured out it wasn’t so much a barrier as the boy stepping half-way out of this dimension entirely. “Report.”

“I can’t exclude the possibility that I missed some hole in the ground, but I don’t see how. There’s indeed a fake dimension in there, a dream realm. But it isn’t that large, barely the size of a small town. None of these people are inside, just a bunch of fake ones that some girl is using to live out her fantasies of a normal life, it’s repulsive.”

Aw, little baby was lying, or maybe he really believed it? It could easily be both, humans could be so bigoted to each other, it was always a treat to witness. Rizevim glanced up at the unhappy couple nailed to the canvas frame in a parody of Grandfather’s crucifixion, but only briefly. He had to mind his disguise after all. “A dream realm, you say? Not an actual space?”

“Indeed, sir, Dimension Lost won’t be any help here.”

“Pity. What of this girl, then? What does she look like?”

“Like you’d expect a daughter of these two to look.”

“Describe her for me.”

The boy did one better and conjured an illusory seeming of her. It looked nothing like the woman who took half of Grauzauberer down with her when they stormed the place on Mephisto’s – and thus Rizevim’s – orders. So… The other daughter hadn’t, in fact, died with her in the fire like the long-haired harpy had fooled them all into thinking? With – what? Painted marionettes? And she’d destroyed all the family portraits and almost every record and personal correspondence too, preventing them from finding who the other ‘Painters’ were.

If Rizevim had known that bitch was so formidable, he’d have joined the attack himself and taken her alive to make into his concubine instead. Or maybe the opposite would’ve been better? Order a more moderate assault and let her get away? A proper drawn-out war between her ‘Painters’ and their ‘Writers’ would’ve been a most engaging immersion, no doubt about it.

Still, though. A second daughter. Two daughters, and a son going by that tomb in their maze garden. With the parents it made five. Five cases of walking hubris who presumed to call themselves His match just because they could paint fake dream worlds on fabric and paper.

At least Innovate Clear had an excuse for his delusion. “Do you think you can pull her out?”

The boy grimaced. “I’m afraid not, Lord Satanael. If we had her body I might be able to use the link to reel her back somehow from this side, but I’m not sure how I’d go about it. From inside, I’m afraid I stand no chance to overcome her control of the lucid dream. Maybe if there were still shamans out there we could find to teach me proper dreamwalking, but-”

“But if any traditions still exist, their practitioners must be hidden by pagan patrons, if not wholesale moved to their hidden realms.” ‘Satanael’ grimly sympathized. “The church and the devils have been entirely too successful at eliminating them.”

Just because astral projection was a small price to pay didn’t change that it was still a price. The human spirit was weak, but annoyingly quick and stealthy when it knew what it was doing. Shamans and sages used to regularly discover and conspire against Hell’s plots back in the day. And not just them either.

The War of the Three factions would’ve happened much sooner if the Church and Hell didn’t find themselves so often on the same side when it came to those pagan pests, all those centuries leading up to it. Not that the Church ever believed it, they were always so certain every witch was a diabolist and every wizard a warlock. Hell barely had to put the work to convince them so, most times.

You’d think Grandfather would set the record straight, but Constantine and Charlemagne proved otherwise very early on, and they were just the two most infamous. For all His benevolence, His Church was dead-set on destroying independently powerful humans from the very beginning. The only reason there were still some left was because all the ‘Holy’ Empires always collapsed from internal rot before they could conquer even a tenth of the world.

Of the pagans that endured, the celts of Albion had been the worst. It was why Hell’s old guard had made a concerted effort to eliminate and impersonate every ancestor ghost and mound fairy they could get away with. One never stopped at mere genocide when it came to worthy opponents after all, at a minimum you had to also destroy their legacy. If you could destroy it in their own descendants’ eyes, all the sweeter.

They didn’t finish the job. Grandfather came down on them before they could. It was very strange, it wasn’t like the Church was ever any less zealous in eradicating the druids and what else. The Brythonic powers had just about joined the war on Heaven’s side in retaliation, when the Norse went and attacked them in turn. In the end, it all worked out for Hell anyway – with the breakdown of world order during the War of the Three Factions, Angles and Saxons invaded the islands and finished the job for them.

Later, after Father and Grandfather both died, it only took a handful of seeded contract magicians to ignite a new pagan panic amidst the Church. They were so busy with their witch hunts and trials after that, they couldn’t find the time to even find out Hell was having a civil war, never mind interfere in it!

Rizevim was not at all ashamed to admit he’d never have come up with such troublesome plans, it was why he didn’t join either side in the devil civil war – watching it all from the sidelines was infinitely more satisfying.

As ever, humans were so ridiculously good and creative at screwing each other over. He could see why Grandfather would be so fascinated by them. Such a shame their other qualities weren’t anywhere as redeeming.

Seeing those qualities now cropping up among devilkind was the most disgusting thing he’d ever had to witness.

“Well, at least we know she’s still alive now,” he told the boy magician. And wasn’t that a feat? She’d have to be over a hundred years old by now, was she in some kind of suspended animation somewhere?

“Unless these canvases allow the spirit to endure even after death,” the brat had the gall to correct him. “Which I cannot categorically rule out.”

Rizevim could, the harpy might have managed to destroy all their records and correspondence, but letters arrived in their mailbox all the way until he had the manor teleported away. If these canvases could extend life beyond death, those letters wouldn’t be filled with so many of those disgusting condolences for their fool son.

A shame the letters proved so useless in tracking down other ‘Painters’. They were a paranoid bunch who never put identifying information in writing, and divination was something Heaven’s System interfered with everyone on. Gradfather was every bit as selfish as the rest of them when it came to things like that. It was why the Asmodeus Starsend Moment trait still failed them so often, and even the usurper Ajuka Beelzebub hadn’t gone around that one.

What wonderful mysteries just fall into Rizevim’s lap! He couldn’t wait to sick his minions on them while he sat back and gave them self-defeating advice. Gaslighting your own minions was a bit gauche, granted, but he had to stay in practice for when the War restarted.

“Well, you’ve done your job,” said ‘Satanael.’ “You’re dismissed. You know where the teleport circle is, you can see yourself out.”

“Yes, sir.”

The teleport circle was in the entry hall, and took the boy about ten minutes to charge it up. For all his supposed talent he was still a human in the end. Rizevim almost didn’t wait for the kid to vanish, letting him feel demonic power being worked here would cast the fox among the chickens and then some. Then he’d only need to drop a worm in Mephisto’s ear that the one and only contractor to make a fool of him had a spirit inheritor, and all Rizevim would have to do is watch the unfolding disaster from a comfortable vantage.

Ultimately, though, he decided against it. One didn’t eat the whole pantry in a single meal.

He’d already dropped plenty of breadcrumbs anyway. He wasn’t putting more than a token effort into playing the part of the late Satanael, for one. Also, there was plenty trace demonic energy from the outbursts of the Old Satans, if the boy didn’t detect them it was his problem. Then, too, this entire place was in the Underworld. Sealed, sure, but while the painted and shuttered windows could be explained as normal secrecy, the air here was proper underworld air, charged and filling, not the mana desert humans had up top.

Brat didn’t even try his luck slipping out with his sacred gear at any point, even just to scout around, it was ridiculous. Since when did human teenagers have self-control?

When he was finally all alone in the big half-burned manor, Rizevim shapeshifted out of his fake appearance. ‘Satanael’, honestly, to think that overambitious savage would keep the name after falling! The presumption on those half-rate guardian angels was truly unbelievable. To call himself THE Adversary of God was nothing less than a direct affront to Lucifer himself.

It was baffling how the fool survived long enough for Rizevim to run into him, when he decided out of boredom to mentor Diodora Astaroth’s peerage on one of their excursions in the Overworld that one time. Satanael had singled them out as a way to test his ‘Abyss Class’ of savage sacred gear wielders. Instead, he was now enjoying the pleasures of Rizevim’s dungeons while Euclid experimented on his minions.

Spies in Lucifaad had told Satanael where they would be in advance. For all that Astaroth knew not to mention things the Four Usurpers would find objectionable, he liked to boast about the rest. Those spies had also been trickling into the Khaos Brigade dungeons and laboratories in the time since. Scheming and rebellious reincarnated devils, one and all, just another unforgiveable mistake that the usurpers had done to devilkind.

Rizevim was amazed that his identity theft still held after this much time too. He never expected he’d get so much mileage from putting this act on in front of mere humans. The Grigori themselves would’ve sniffed him out, even if he had one of Shalba’s Light-Manipulation Devices, but Satanael had broken off relations with them completely so he didn’t need to meet with them at all. With humans it was as easy as pretending he was too far above them to bother calling on his power.

No doubt the ‘Hero’ Faction had someone courting the Grigori as well, openly or otherwise. Rizevim only regretted that he couldn’t be there to see what fantastic conspiracies Azazel and the rest of them came up with, to explain what that person told them of ‘Satanael’s’ actions.

He flew up to take a closer look at the man and his wife. He’d had to be sparing with the ‘torture them awake’ attempts until now, since the magic spells that Euclid and Beelzebub had devised to sustain their soulless bodies was finicky business. His familiars needed to feed them regularly too.

Now, though the bodies were still firmly nailed to the frame by their wrists, and were just as malnourished and desiccated, they seemed a tiny bit healthier. The paint-like stains around their eyes were rippling in slightly different patterns too.

He brought the vampire’s case close to them and opened it very briefly, just enough for the aura of the scrap metal to lick at their skin. Just a moment, he actually felt the energy’s attempt to suppress him. It wasn’t nearly strong enough, but the feeling was irritating and he didn’t want to be irritated so he shut the case back up. Still, even that one moment was enough to make their pallor become healthier. All this from just that brief exposure to that holy energy.

Rizevim smiled cruelly.

Oh, the games he could play with these parvenues now.

Earth

Georg Faust burned all his clothes at the first safehouse, used magic to burn off all his hair at the second one, used more magic to flake off his entire first layer of skin cells at the third, took twice as many detours and turnarounds as normal to dimensionally skim from one place to the next with Dimension Lost, spent a day in a random mountain glade to perform a scouring ritual, and finally reunited with his compatriots on the third day.

“You’re very late,” Cao Cao told him when he finally returned to the Shibamata Taishakuten Temple in Tokyo. This was the current Headquarters of the Hero Faction, lent to them by the Five Principal Clans while they worked against their mutual enemies in the area, the Ututsemi Agency. The Grigori were similarly involved, but the Five Great Families were hedging their bets. All of which they weren’t supposed to know about, but they did. “Jeanne was worried after she and the others had to fly in by plane, since you never showed.”

“That man is not Satanael,” Georg said, his mind too busy for niceties. He drank a potion that would regrow his hair over the next few days and then proceeded to tell his allies all he’d seen, heard, felt and otherwise experienced. Teleportation circles with more dimensional script than time and space combined, a host with a fake face and lackadaisical aura whose flavor was lost in the haze of Light magic from a concealed bracelet, a French belle epoque manor located in the Underworld no matter what its owner pretended otherwise, and that canvas- “A man and a woman nailed to the frame of their canvas like a parody of Adam and Eve put through the torment that Jesus went through on the Cross, no true Grigori would ever do something so gauche, renegade or not.”

“A devil then, it has to be,” pronounced Arthur Pendragon. “That begs the question, however – was Satanael already replaced when he betrayed the Grigori and took his students to form his splinter cell, or not?”

“We’ll let the Grigori figure that out,” Cao Cao decided. “It’s no concern of ours.”

“But we’ll tell them what we found out, I assume?”

“You can drop a bug in Reni’s ear, what she does with it is her business as usual. It’s not time for the Five Families to learn that we’ve seen through their double-dealing.”

“Very well.”

“Those devil freaks make me want to punch them in the face more and more every day,” growled Heracles, the two-meter man who carried the spirit of the Greek mythological hero of the same name. He cracked his knuckles with teeth bared. “They’re literally begging for it at this point.”

“For once I agree with the meathead,” said Jeanne. “But if Georg is right, this one might be too much for us at this stage. Especially if he has allies as strong as those other traces of demonic power suggest.”

“Bastard is taunting us,” Siegfried grumbled. “I dare you to say he isn’t. How much does he really know about us, do you think?”

“Less than he believes he does.” Georg was quite confident of that. “But more than what we should be comfortable with. We should settle matters here quickly and get back to our true headquarters as soon as possible. I am confident I was not followed-“

“-But who knows, in times like these,” agreed Cao Cao, hefting his sacred gear up to gaze at the reflective sheen of its blade. The True Longinus was an ornate spear with a dark blue rod longer than all but the longest polearms, and featured golden metal decorations in the shapes of arrow tips that spiraled around it in a double helix pattern. The decorations finished at the top of the rod with a white circle, which was completely empty save for a cross that filled it in. The silver tip was large enough to be called a sword unto itself, and its blue metal was smooth as a mirror. “The Truth of God is getting louder.”

“What does that mean?” Asked Jeanne, though Georg had already guessed.

“Change,” Cao Cao said gravely. “Something will occur that will completely change the world. Something big. Something soon.”

“Come on, man, anyone can spout that fortune cookie bullshit,” Siegfried complained, slouching in his seat. “How soon are we talking?”

“The time frame is unclear, I’m afraid to say, but the matter of where is slightly more indicative. I think it’s time to change our planned itineraries for recruitment. Central Europe has gained an all-new draw all of a sudden.”

If only that was a guarantee of good fortune. Unfortunately, the will of the Bible God moved in mysterious ways.

This became all the more apparent when Cao Cao interpreted whatever vagueness his spear blew at him, to mean that he should take Jeanne and Arthur to meet Unknown Dictator in the USA, while Georg went with Heracles to Romania, of all places. They were to follow up on some rumors about either a monster slayer or a monster layer, you couldn’t quite tell with the way Grigori intelligence insisted on being half pornography. Especially second-hand intelligence smuggled out by a clandestine relation that Arthur insisted was not romantic (the self-centered lout).

Good news, they found their guy. He was in either his late thirties or early forties, with blue eyes and shoulder-length dark red hair, and a full shaggy beard. He wasn’t as tall as Heracles’ two meters, but his frame was about as muscular in the limbs, and actually more so around the waist. It was the physique of an ancient Olympic athlete, which made his occupation all the stranger. Of all the possible things he could have been, the man was some random car repairman.

It was late at night when they finally found him, so they didn’t have to wait to approach him.

Bad news, the man wasn’t interested in anything they had to say. He only answered the door – dressed only in shorts – to tell them to leave, politely but more firmly than everyone else they’d ever approached. Worse news, he didn’t have a sacred gear, Georg’s spells and the smuggled Grigori scanner both agreed on it. Even worse news, Georg didn’t get a chance to say so before Heracles took the man’s refusal as poorly as he took everything else, and started a fight right then and there.

It was a disaster. The man turned Heracles’ first charge into a wrestling clinch that he won, and then threw Heracles so hard that he flew off like a cannonball all the way out of town.

Heracles crashed in the middle of the Danube river, completely confused about which way was which, having lost his spatial awareness to the point where he didn’t know which shore to swim for. He ended up stranding himself on an island. When Georg found him through a frantic grid-search with side-dimensional space-skipping, Heracles was cursing up a storm at his repeated failure to jump back to shore. The island was one of those delta types where the ground was all soft mud and humus that made for the worst footing imaginable. Every attempt to make a giant leap turned into a pratfall instead, the fool was so angry he was about to swim across from spite.

Georg had to use Dimension Lost to side-wind him back to shore, and somehow he guy was already there waiting for them.

Goerg made to speak, but Heracles charged roaring again, the blunderhead!

Heracles won the first clinch this time. He didn’t manage to throw the guy’s balance off, but he lifted him up and then slammed him down so hard he sank into the ground down to the ankles. In response, the guy easily ripped himself free and returned the favor, except he drove Heracles into the ground up to the waist. When Heracles ripped himself free in a rage, they met in a third clinch, which the guy won again and drove Heracles into the ground all the way to his neck.

“You know the difference between myths and fairy tales?” the man asked while Heracles was struggling to dig himself out. The soil was almost as hard as brick at the surface, but below was clay soft enough that every thrash just made him sink deeper. “Myths are stuff that’s been rendered down until they’re half-way plausible. Fairy tales are the stuff too fanciful to ever do that with. That’s why nobody believes them until we smack them in the face.”

“I’LL SMACK YOUR FACE IN JUST A MINUTE!”

A mighty glowing aura erupted from the earth, allowing Heracles to break free and haul himself out of the pit he’d been driven in with all the angry wrath of the sacred gear known as Variant Detonation

“Heracles, not again!” Georg shouted over the buffeting wind. “We’re here to recruit him, not kill him!” If he struck the man and that aura exploded with the usual force, he’d – How many recruits must he do this to?! Why even make him co-leader of their whole organization if they weren’t going to listen to him-

“Right, I’m putting you in time out.”

The man – they’d never managed to even ask his name! – pulled the biggest spatha Georg had ever seen from behind the tree he’d never once moved a step away from, wound it back like a baseball bat right as Heracles charged with a roar, and smacked him in the face.

Force, momentum, and the explosion of Heracles’ own sacred gear combined in a blow so devastating that the spirit inheritor of the legendary hero of Greece was send shooting into the sky like a ballistic missile.

In the wake of the mighty clash of strength against power, the only thing Georg could hear was a gong as loud as ten bells, which slowly, slowly wound down into a persistent ringing that didn’t seem to leave his eardrums.

“Open your mouth, take those hands off your ears, let the air pressure normalize,” the man instructed. “Now join hands at the back of your head, clasped fingers. Good, now use your thumbs to tap the base of your skull. That’s right, keep at it.”

Georg’s new case of chronic tinnitus miraculously faded by the fifteenth tap… and then he realized he’d automatically followed the orders of a complete stranger – an enemy who’d – oh no, Heracles!

“He’ll live, I used the flat side.” The outrageous man that was still only dressed in shorts stowed his sword away someplace, and Georg was seriously regretting not joining in on the fight with his spells from the start, what possessed him to-?! “Don’t come bothering me again, I’m already committed to someone else. Not that I’d ever join up with a bunch that disrespects their elders like this.”

The man walked off.

Georg stood there stupidly.

He stared after the man. He turned to stare in the direction where Heracles had vanished off.

It took him days to find Heracles again, the complete moron had been knocked out for ages, and when he finally woke up he couldn’t use any sane means of contact like, oh, a phone call because he was in some middle-of-nowhere place without reception or landlines. Then, instead of just finding a road to follow back to civilization, the oaf decided that the thing to do was leap from place to place randomly while firing flares up into the sky. As if he didn’t have two broken limbs and internal bleeding. As if Georg had any hope to spot such a thing! That man had batted Heracles all the way to Ukraine!

What possessed Georg to ever follow the lead of such a brainless oaf?!

He had to stop forgetting that he was not like the others. Cao Cao, Jeanne, Arthur, Heracles, Siegfried, Leonardo, his allies had each inherited the spiritual legacy of those same-name heroes of old, but Faust was not the same. He was no mere spiritual inheritor, he was a true reincarnation. He had no memories to prove it, it had been a true and proper rebirth by design, but he doubted any of the others had received a magically recorded message upon reaching age sixteen, with directions to magical caches and book stashes.

The original Johann Georg Faust hadn’t been a charlatan, he’d been a cynical visionary who saw the slow doom of man’s world and refused to go quietly. He recognized that the increasing ability of devil kind to cross over to the Overworld could only be done if Heaven was failing. When he summoned Mephisto and argued against the demon’s point that the devil’s existence proved the existence of God – just because one half of the story is true doesn’t logically follow that the other half must be – Faust didn’t really mean it. He wanted to see if Mephisto conceded the point, which he did.

Devils lie, this was known. Also, Faust knew reverse psychology when he saw it. Just because the term hadn’t been coined yet didn’t mean the method of manipulation hadn’t been in use since the dawn of speech. There was no way a devil out to get human souls would genuinely try to persuade him not to make a deal with the devil.

Then, too, there was the issue of how flimsy a retaliation the Church was managing against the increasing number of ‘damned’ like him – he wasn’t the first to make deals with the devil by far, but there were way too many around his same time frame, summoning them shouldn’t be anywhere near so easy. Coupled with the complete lack of response by angels to the same, or even to prayers (he’d successfully communicated with his guardian angel regularly as a child, especially in lucid dreams, but that abruptly stopped happening when he reached double digit age) Faust recognized that something had fundamentally broken in the world.

By the end of the first meeting with Mephisto, Faust had deduced that God was powerless, gone, or dead, and the man was in no mood to become collateral damage like destiny seemed determined to make of all mankind.

He didn’t set out to screw Hell over from the start, he made the deal in good faith because there were few other options to climb out of the fringes of society at the time. It was for the same reasons why he didn’t exactly have the best view of the Church to begin with. Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, it wasn’t the wishy-washy feel-good nonsense of today, it was all still prescriptive and oppressive then. Little wonder, seeing as it had been spread at the tip of a sword, which automatically invalidated it as a good ideology. He really did set out to live a life of luxury and hedonism, what else was there to do when you were born in a game that your forebears had already lost?

But year after year was a long time to watch the power of the Church break – because the relationship between the church and Heaven broke – and, more importantly, to run into fellow occultists with much more ambitious prospects than his own.

They gave him some much-needed perspective. Almost all of them agreed that having to put in appearances at every Sunday mass was small price to pay for devils to look elsewhere. Sure, they had to fast-talk around inquisitors and exorcists whenever someone reported them being up at night in their own home, but most of those investigators were such prudes that they immediately dropped the trail in put-upon disgust when someone ‘confessed’ to night-time liaisons. It wasn’t an instant pick-me-up, but consistency had a strength of its own, and again, year after year was a long time.

The common story of Faust said he asked Mephisto for 24 years of service, but in reality he only lived off the devil’s back for ten before he began putting the work to get fame and riches all by himself. What Faust really learned from Mephisto after that was magic. The original teachings that Merlin had given humanity had been stamped out by the Church by his time. Since that same Church – and Heaven – couldn’t be relied upon anymore to be a thorn in Hell’s side, it was imperative that someone re-introduce those magical arts to mankind so they could fend for themselves when society collapsed.

His other goal became to understand the mechanics of the soul. This he got from the Sami of Finland via astral projection, something Mephisto couldn’t follow him on, being a devil.

Combined, he used this knowledge to deliberately induce his own reincarnation through an exploit Heaven’s system – ironically enough via ritual suicide – just a day before Mephisto was due his payment.

The known story of Johann Georg Faust ended with an account of his mutilated remains being found in his room the next day, with his eyes in the bedroom and his body broken down in the yard after being thrown out the window. This was very probably true. Mephisto would have been very angry at him making himself a way out, and would have had nothing else to lash out at after his complete defeat.

Faust didn’t experience any of it because he was already gone by then, homunculus animation magic was actually running his body at that point.

Faust hadn’t expected that Mephisto would or even could stay in the human world, to insinuate himself as the leader of his magician organization out of petty vengeance. He hadn’t known that Heaven’s System had decayed that much, that devils could just cross over permanently instead of needing a human to act as anchor and intercessor like before. It was a dreadful irony that he was still there even now, at the head. The whole of Grauzauberer was corrupt now, a lost cause, as were all the off-shoots that sprung from it since.

If only Chaos Break was ready, Georg lamented after he finally delivered Heracles to their enclave in Greece, and doped him up on healing potions with a sleeping one mixed in, just to have some peace from his ranting. Just one injection would’ve made Heracles more than strong enough to beat – whoever that was.

Myth versus fairy tale. What a wording. What fairy tale would that man claim to be, if asked? What fairy tales did that backwater country even have?

Georg looked at the wall to the little room he had settled in, wondering how long an excursion it would be to trawl the Romanian public libraries for answers, if they even had them over there. He looked in the mirror. His hair had grown back with the occasional white thread and it was all Heracles’ fault.

He lay back on his bed and pressed his palms against his eyes with a groan, asking himself why he should even bother. This generation of humanity was an even more lost cause than the last one. It was why he’d advised Cao Cao and Jeanne to make sure Unknown Dictator didn’t leave their meeting without a geas, to keep him from speaking to anyone else of their meetings. Good faith didn’t exist anymore, hopefully they’d listen to him about that, at least.

He thought of his room back at headquarters, with his bookshelf and big, soft bed that infringed on all Japanese sensibilities. He thought about his own home in Austria too, where he had hidden the stuff nobody knew about, not even his allies. Most recently, everything he found in that canvas that neither the devils nor Grigori nor even his fellow heroes knew about.

Information. And substance, because he’d lied to ‘Satanael’, whoever he really was. It wasn’t just a mere dream world in there. Substance, what the Painters and their creations called chroma – it may not be physical substance, but spiritual substance was still substance. And, possibly, the key ingredient he’d been looking for to complete Chaos Break, perhaps even make it safe to use.

All he had to do was find that girl’s body and free her from that painted world.

He sat up with a huff.

There was no way he could do it all without help, but how could he even sell the necessity of his mission? They’d dismiss him as a lovestruck teenager besotted by a fantasy from a dream!

If only Cao Cao wasn’t so elitist with their human resources as to not realize the blind spots in his strategies. If only the others actually lived up to their ancestors’ examples, instead of hyper-focusing on one gimmick! Heracles didn’t complete his labors with brute power, he had to come up with clever tricks for almost all of them! Why the hell was his spiritual inheritor such an imbecile?

Georg fell back on the bed with a groan, then got back up again.

At least all this walking on eggshells meant he’d have more than enough time to design a new geas just for that paintress girl.

Terribly sorry for this oncoming betrayal of your so very poignant and desperate trust, fair Alice, but betting on trust and honor was entirely a fool’s wager these days.

Heaven

Michael called the other great seraphs the moment it happened.

“Sephiroth Graal has vanished from Father’s system.”

With the sole exception of the increasingly rare righteous souls that earned entry, Heaven had been sealed since the moment God perished, for the sake of preserving the last things in His orphaned design that were still true and good.

It didn’t stop the other Powers from perceiving that something had struck a crack in the foundation of the Pearly Gates.

A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - September 2025 Update

Will be published in 2 parts everywhere else on

A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - August 2025 Update

Finally got this done. Will be published in 2 p

A Backwards Approach to Clarke’s Law - July 2025 Update

Another super long one, pretty action-packed to

A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - Chapter 4

it's been a long time since I wrote so much for

Merry Christmas!

Thank you all for being here this year (and the one before), your existence has been and continues to be a literal gift (legally and contractually, this isn't just me being a sap).

The Unified Theorem - Chapter II.2 (24)

With this, the plot is set for the second book. I have a feeling you all will find this plotline more interesting than the first one. Probably the new additions to the cast too.

================================

Chapter 24 (II.2): Recruiting Aviators in Three Easy Steps

“-. Falstad Wildhammer .-“

It was the year 220 after the War of the Three Hammers, which meant the Wildhammer Clan would be holding their decennial carousal down in the Khaz Modan Highlands. There, on the day of the Summer Solstice, they’d hold a memorial for their dead heroes on Thunderstrike Mountain, then cap off the rest of the month with a keg party in Kirthaven at the mountain’s foot.

It was also the third moon of the year, which meant that the troll raids were in full swing. March was the start of spring, but while this meant that you didn’t freeze your balls off as easy as before, it also meant you still had months before you were able to produce more food the proper way. Since the one exception to this was livestock, those were naturally the things the trolls went after the most. And wild game, but they hated the dwarves too much to settle for that.

In short, Falstad Wildhammer already had enough to worry about without the news of a human war band coming from the north.

“What do we know?”

Snoring was his reply.

Falstad clenched his fists around his gryphon’s reins. “Hestra, hop an’ land again, make it loud this time.”

His gryphon obeyed and even screeched for good measure. It didn’t do jack shite. Under the judgmental stare of the other gryphon lounging nearby, the dwarf ‘scout’ just snorted and turned over in his sleep.

Spirits, why do ye do this to me? Falstad took a slow calming breath, dismounted, ambled over without even trying to be quiet, crouched down, and lowered his mouth right next to the other dwarf’s ear. “SCHINDIGGER!”

“Wuzzat?

He didnae even jump, pure unbelievable!

“Oh! Right! ‘M ‘wake – ‘m awake!”

This is our finest gryphon rider. “Report a’fore I clout ye one!”

Rhapsody Schindigger staggered unsteadily to his feet. “Nothin’ to it, sir, they’s just been sittin’ an’ eatin'!”

Falstad’s hands twitched for his stormhammer. "There’s nobody down there now, ye fool! They’ve been gone fer ages, had to fly near ten more minutes to get here after I passed ‘em!”

The fool peered down over the ledge, because he apparently hadn’t insulted Falstad enough and just had to add liar accusations on top, by the makers!

“If ye’re done?”

“Hmm? Oh!” The dunce finally turned to salute. “Sir aye sir, sir!”

That’s the strongest booze breath I’ve felt all week!

It was honestly impressive, but that just made it even more infuriating that the numpty didn’t have the courtesy to get sloshed in his off-hours like the rest of ‘em. At least Falstad would be able to participate in that competition, instead of being stuck corralling fools like this! “Right. Now give it another go, proper ken this time, eh?”

“What? Oh! Reporting! Aye sir, as you say sir, sorry sir! Nothin’ tae report, sir! Reckon ah must've nodded off, won’t happen again, nae chance!”

“Ye’re right about that,” Falstad seethed. “Get yerself back to Aerie Peak an’ report to Gryphon Master Stoutarm that ye’re on dung shovelin’ duty fer the rest of the month!”

“What?! But sir –!”

Falstad clouted him to shut him up, shook his head with grit teeth, hopped back onto Hestra’s saddle and took off before the fool could open his mouth again.

When he caught up with the human interlopers, the distraction from what he’d just endured was damn near a blessing.

Hundred ‘n four, Falstad counted from on high, not trying all that hard to go unseen. Old man, young lad, one of ‘em slavish servant types humans like to keep – ugh – all at the beck and call of a right huge pretty boy with a beard – ack, that’ll never stop botherin’ ‘im now, he just knew it!

Horses enough for all, but the old man wasn’t riding, he was driving one of the wagons. Of which there were five, a number which could be small or big depending on what sort the rest of the men were. They were precisely one full hundred. Each of them with their own horse too, not counting the handful of spares pulling the other carts.

Falstad followed them along the peaks up until noon, blending his mind with Hestra’s to borrow her sight and her hearing whenever needed. Everything he heard and saw just reinforced his initial thoughts.

These folk ain’t here to sell no wine.

Wine was Lordaeron’s best export, but this was nae trade caravan. Least not just a trade caravan. These men weren’t normal caravan guards neither, they were all kitted with plate and polearm, all on top of shield and sword. Sturdy oilskin cloaks, daggers, crossbows, white tabards bearing the crest of some clenched gauntlet done in gold or silver, some had pollaxes, others hammers so big they could play tossball with any unfortunate dwarf that got anywhere close…

They carried themselves all proper too, these weren’t no dandies on their first ride in field kit. Not caravan guards and not bandits either, these were hardboiled knights.

A diplomatic mission then?

But the Clan had an understanding with the humans, one set down in stone and scroll on the same day that the Empire of Arathor let them settle the region. It had been held to even after the empire ended, by both Lordaeron to the north and Strom to the west. There was a neutral zone along the border, and any human party was to stop right inside and put up a peace flag to call one of their gryphon riders down. Send word ahead, as it were.

You only didn’t do that when it was something right urgent, but these folk didn’t act like it. They traveled heavy, with purpose but not hurried, definitely not fleeing. Soldiers like these, they could lay camp at a moment’s notice and break it just as fast. On a campaign Falstad would expect them to stop only after dark and move on with the first rays of dawn… but instead they’d loitered so long under Schindigger’s nose that he passed out from boredom! And the booze, granted, but still.

The band stopped at noon for supper too, which they definitely wouldn’t have done if they were in a rush. Good eatin’ too, they had dried rations but weren’t shy of hunting, and in a neutral zone it wasn’t even poaching. They also found water and foraged for seasonings like people who’d done this all their lives. Their woodcraft was decent, as these things went. Even the shaman might not have anything to grumble about.

And he didn’t. Falstad, as usual, proved right correct when he finally met back with the greybeard in question, who’d been using the highest peak other than Aerie Peak itself to spy on the humans from further south using the farsight of the elements.

“What d’ ye have fer me, Elder?”

“Can’t tell if the big lad is older or younger than he looks.” Coming from Gavan Grayfeather, that was quite the admission. “But he’s definitely in charge of the lot.”

That fit Falstad’s own reckoning mostly, but not all. “What about the old man? Pretty boy seems to defer to ‘im.”

Grayfeather looked at him sharply. “A light insult is still an insult, an’ easily turns heavy when misaimed. I understand ye’re forced to deal with many beardlings, Wing Commander, but I strongly advise against judgin’ humans the same way. They may not live as long as us, but they mature just as fast and their elders don’t coddle them half as long.”

Flastad scrunched his nose. “As ye say, Elder.”

“It needn’t be as I say, ye’ve ears and eyes, don’t ye? I’m sure ye’ve seen the same things I have.”

“Fer barely two hours.”

“Well, I’ve had two days and I tell ye it’s only been more o’ the same.”

Falstad stood on the ledge, watching alongside the elder as the band approached at a steady trot. The humans were getting damn close to their actual border now. What they did at that point would determine if the Wildhammers went down to meet them as a host or a war host.

For better or worse, they stopped short of the unmarked boundary, even though the border crossing itself was built two hundred meters further down. The outpost was a walled compound that completely blocked the pass, with a thick iron portcullis and right in middle of a death zone where literally every rock, nook and cranny concealed a trap door or machicolation. The Wildhammers may prefer their gryphons and stormhammers, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have land forces. If anything, the ground pounders always felt like they had something to prove, which was why they dug entire defense complexes wherever they could. The above-ground bunkers were just there to make a statement, which came in handy in times like these.

‘Course that’s no guarantee either, we did tell the human bigshot we had killing fields the last time we matched maps, but that doesn’t mean one of e’m couldn’t just suss it out. It was a stretch, but since nothing was impossible Falstad had to at least entertain the chance. This lot certainly looked down more often than they looked up.

Their overlook was wooded, and hidden by the natural rockface too, so the two dwarves had pretty good camouflage to watch. As the humans spread out and made camp, Falstad took his time studying them, though he wasn’t able to listen in this time, even with Hestra’s ears.

“Ut i skuma ~”

Falstad looked at the shaman incredulously, they were trying to be stealthy-

“Lokkar til meg ~ Kvite ramnen ~ Duld og dvelande~”

- but he was singing all of a sudden, low and steady like the ice of Khaz Moden in high winter, what words even were these – wait, what’s that-?

“Høyr eg spør! ~ Lend meg ei fjør ~ Så skal eg verkje ~ vingar kvite~”

A white raven flew up from below – the familiar! Grayfeather’s familiar, he’d been using it to spy, but – it was singing too?!

“Lat oss flyga ~ I vide vindar ~ I hugjen veida ~ Med songen seida~”

The song, it came from below too!

“Høyr eg spør! ~ Lend meg vidsyn ~ Lat meg skilje ~ Sjå i skodda~”

The humans were singing it, the knights! “Elder!” Falstad rushed to shake the older dwarf by the shoulders, but he was in some trance. The song chose that moment to change too, turning into some sort of great, wordless cry that rang below from dozens of human throats – and the raven screamed it too, and the shaman! If not for the elevation and the healthy wind the humans would get wise to them for sure, but did they even need it? They were clearly behind this! “Elder, snap out of it!”

He didn’t, just kept singing.

“Shit!” It was like the greybeard was totally blootered all of a sudden, and on mushrooms instead of booze, what now? Should he slap him? Strike him? Should Falstad kill the raven before he fell to the enchantment too? The song sounded mighty fine even though he didn’t understand a thing, curse it-!

“Vil du meg fylgja ~ i all mi tid? ~ Vil du meg varda ~ i all mi tid?”

Just as he was about to smite the raven dead, the rumbling chant changed to the voice of a woman, and Falstad was struck motionless by the sudden vision of a great, shining dame with angel wings singing alongside the spirits themselves in the realm unseen.

“Gygrefuggel ~ Gav meg vingar ~ Kvite korpa ~ Gav meg sjon ~ Galdrekråka ~ Gav meg songen ~ Kvite vingar ~ Fylgjer meg~”

Falstad felt it when the song ended, in his soul and flesh both – if it was a spell, what would it do? What had it done? He couldn’t let it-!

“Scunnering planks!” Grayfeather erupted in an outburst, suddenly lucid again.

“Thank the makers!” Falstad hissed as lowly as he could, abruptly free of the – spellbind, he didn’t feel nothing like that but it had to be a spellbind, it had to be… the song had finished, after – what? Six, seven minutes? They weren’t the longest seven minutes of Falstad’s life, but they were up there! He dropped to a knee before the older dwarf. “Elder, what happened?”

“Turnabout. I think,” the old dwarf almost didn’t lift his arm the right way to catch his white raven, also normal again. “Spyin’ and snoopin’ repaid with… forced rule of shared customs. I think, Wing Commander, that we just experienced a very gentle message to and through the spirits to kindly sod off.”

“Say what?” Flastad blinked. “How? By what? Who?” That ghostly woman? That glow – not witchery? – gold – isn’t that how humans describe their Light? But seizing minds! How insidious compared to what they claim of their holy miracle-~

“Other spirits it felt like,” Grayfeather upended Falstad’s inner rant. “But it were right odd, like – like loudmouths broken off the whole with more power than sense, letting the proper spirits feel more than they – than I was prepared for. The song was just… the way back out. What do them manlings feed those things over there?”

“Feed?” Falstad was stumped. “Ye mean spirits? Other spirits? Fragments?” Didn’t the pieces go mad, if they broke loose? Turned into crazy elementals? “I thought the humans had no shamans?”

“Well clearly that’s old information, isn’t it now?”

The same couldn’t be said about Falstad’s vision of the, what? Angel woman? Which Grayfeather was very interested in hearing described in thorough detail when he learned of it.

Falstad was ready to call either attack or retreat just for having to endure that, but… it didn’t seem as if the humans were on to them? Or they were pretending ignorance really well? Was it a courtesy, or another insult? Bah! A pox on all the elder races and their confounding ways, bah! Bah, he said!

Falstad decided to call their bluff, if it was a bluff, and continued with his surveillance.

He and Grayfeather were limited now, to what they could see or pick up on the wind, but Falstad still got a fair bit from just seeing the party at rest, especially with Hersa’s help. Pretty boy was clearly in charge of things, even though he was younger than everyone except his young squire. His manservant was disturbingly meek, which Falstad had seen with highborn humans before, and even some of the traders they got, but it didn’t stop there. The knights also deferred to him, and they weren’t just humoring some highborn brat, they were completely genuine about it. Even seemed to be learning something from him.

At the same time, the old whitebeard seemed to be the exception, but also kind of wasn’t? He didn’t seem to have any authority, or didn’t go out of his way to exert any, but he also tended to get lost in his own head a lot. He was… sad? No, it was more than that. There was something deeply bothering the whitebeard, though he pushed it aside with elderly grumbling and obviously fake bluster whenever he caught himself. Which he didn’t always seem to manage without help.

Hersa thought it was that thing that she saw in gryphons who lost their riders, and Falstad had to agree. He’d seen the same in old longbeards that had to bury a young wing mate, or a relative. Old man was wallowing, and not the right way.

Pretty boy must’ve agreed, because he seemed to have made it his mission to always draw the old man out of those moods. Lad was very considerate of him actually, all the time. Must be right exhausting. An old relative? They didn’t look anything alike, and the old man was small in comparison…

The knights didn’t act near as familiar with the whitebeard, but that didn’t seem to be a slight either. If anything, they held him in reverence.

Reverence for one and loyalty to the other, Falstad felt like that wasn’t the best combination. He hadn’t been born yet back then, but the War of The Three Hammers happened exactly because people’s mutual respect didn’t measure up to their loyalty, after the singular subject of that loyalty went and died. Positions here seemed to be reversed, or maybe he was misreading things and they weren’t but-

Why am I thinking about that war? That there’s not a good omen!

Omen went and turned even badder when noise interrupted them that wasn’t coming from down below.

Instead, a beardling huffed and puffed his way up the rock face behind them, never mind that this lookout was supposed to be the perfect spot because you couldn’t get it the landbound way. Lad only had a couple of light picks too, and no spikes on his boot toes. This was a right masterful climber, Falstad admitted grudgingly, though the idea that trolls or whatever else might be capable of the same wasn’t a pleasant reality check.

“What do ye want, laddy? Can't ye see we’ve got problems to take care of here? Who has time to stand around yapping with some little straggler? Bad enough there’s trolls coming outta the woodwork, now it’s humans too! Make it snappy.”

“Need – ter – warn!” The dwarf barely had breath to speak, flopping down on his face when he was finally back on level ground. “Div’nation – not workin’ right!”

Eh?

After waiting for the lad to catch his breath, Falstad really started seeing omens everywhere.

“Yer master can’t scry anythin’ about these humans?” the shaman finally asked the lad – one Thadius Grimshade – after he finally explained why he was there. “Sounds like they’ve had even less luck than me.”

“Not so, elder,” the lad rasped, completely oblivious to the gravel stuck in his rumpled beard. “We don’t even get starts or fits, that says loads. Means someone down there’s real important.”

Grayfeather seemed to get it. “Because they’re either protected, or they aren’t.”

Falstad didn’t get it. “An explanation would be nice.”

“If they’re protected from divination, that means they have some rare and powerful magic. If they’re not, that means they must’ve done things that’ve already had extremely wide impacts that haven’t settled. Considering the massive uproar the elements had not so long ago…”

“Well ain’t that a riot,” Falstad grunted, turning to the newcomer. “Well lad, which is it?”

“Dunno sir, either? If they’re a big shot it won’ just be them that’s hard to divine, it should be harder to divine everythin’. Might be that’s true, Explorer Talonaxe’s been seeing me teacher lots more than usual, and the League’s expedition into the Badlands was delayed every time. But I don’t know anything about all that, sirs, I’m just an apprentice.”

“So ye're a glorified errand boy fer some old Explorers' League geezers, eh? Well congratulations, ye get to do more of the same fer me! Since ye’re so spry, why don’t ye go to them elves in their lodge over yonder and ask them if they’ve got the same problems? Shouldn’t be more than a few days’ hike, I used to do the same just fer fun back in my day, but don’t ye dare come back before ye’ve got an answer! Don’t care how long it takes, if those old grumblers complain tell ‘em to take it up with me. Now get a move on, and use this rope and harness to get down properly instead of those picks, where did ye even get them that they blunt so easy? If I catch ye climbing ravines without proper gear again I'm gonna put ye to some real work.”

The high elves were the only other elder race that the Wildhammers trusted any, though they hadn’t bled on the same ground either. Like the humans, they were perfectly content letting the dwarves do the bleeding as the buffer nation between them and the trolls. Falstad couldn’t even grumble that much about it, both the elves and the men had told them upfront what they were getting into, when the Wildhammers came all the way north instead of staying in the Highlands with the rest of their kind.

“Poor lad,” the shaman muttered after the beardling had rappelled down enough that he wouldn’t hear. “You didnae need be so harsh.”

“Pfeh! Jalinde Summerdrake’s a bleedin’ heart an’ then some, an earnest lad like that? She’ll have ‘im with his feet up an’ eatin’ cakes within ten minutes o’ showin’ up, and she’ll keep at it however long it takes ‘em to do tarot tests or whatnot. I give it at least a couple o’ days, probably more. Elvish instincts, doncha know – they live so long that everyone else vanishes in the blink of an eye. Some stay aloof so they don’ have to deal with it, but the others?”

“They dote,” Grayfeather realized. “You set him up for a vacation?

“The League’s got plenty gryphons on call and they’re all expertly trained, but they made that lad climb up here? I wouldn’t risk this deathtrap. Someone has it out for that boy. I don’t have time to look into it right now, but I will in a few days.”

“… You’ll make a fine High Thane one day.”

“Bite yer tongue, me cousin’s perfectly fine and still plenty young too.”

“Of course,” thankfully, Gavan Grayfeather wasn’t just humoring him. “I assume you gave the lad your worst attitude so he wouldn’t presume to come to you for rescue again?”

“A Wildhammer has to learn to take care of himself, he’ll be fine without handouts.” Falstad grunted before mounting Hersa. “Ye stayin’ or comin’?”

Grayfeather looked down, coincidentally right as the big lad in charge happened to look in their direction from all the way down there. The greenery should still hide them, but neither of them were fine assuming it no more. “Probably best I not linger here on my own,” the elder decided. “Just in case that’s not a coincidence.”

Coincidence, right.

The humans had finally put up the right flag, but Falstad only flew a wide, visible circle in the air above their camp before turning away and flying back to the Aviary, signaling all but one of the standby scout wings to follow him back home. He resisted the urge to do a final pass just to see the looks on their faces after the sudden flyover of a dozen gryphon riders. While it was nice that the manlings were finally acting proper, they also deserved to stew a little for the hassle they put him through.

Also, they had stopped just short of getting on the bad side of the Wildhammer Redoubt, so Falstad couldn’t treat them as trespassers. He’d need to go through the fuss of assembling a diplomatic hodgepodge instead, now, ugh.

The grass of the Hinterlands was already peeking out through the snow, vibrant and green even at that height in the Aeries mountains. Aerie Peak spanned almost the entire length of the chain. It was a majestic, sprawling city of wide paths and airy buildings with plenty of space between each other, helped along by the natural environment with many drops and rises, through which they’d carved extensive tunnel networks as was proper. For the Wildhammers, who valued their independence and personal space above everything else save maybe the gryphons in some cases, it was almost a dream given life. It was ironic that they’d only built it because they were kicked out of their prior homes (twice).

It was doubly ironic that the place was on the very edge of the territory they ostensibly controlled, right at the crossroads of the only two entryways to the Hinterlands, from the North and West.

“A third possibility strikes me,” shaman Grayfeather told him as they dismounted at the aviary.

“What’s that?”

“Divination might not be a lost cause because of what those people did, but what others are doing in response. If we’re not the only ones trying to divine the actions of these people, we’re each the others’ interference. If that’s the case, I have a feeling those men themselves know it too.”

Of course they did.

Falstad bid goodbye to the shaman and spent a little while playing with Hersa’s baby, Swiftwing. It was a sad thing, but gryphons didn’t live near as long as dwarves, so a good rider had to make sure not to ignore the hatchlings. Since Hersa was starting to show her years and her mate was dead, this one little tyke was her last clutch. Probably Falstad’s next mount too, if nothing took Hersa before her time. She should live long enough to see him grown, at least.

It was exhausting keeping up with such a lively creature, it didn’t used to be but these days it was. But Falstad Wildhammer always did his duty.

It was a bit of a walk to Wildhammer Keep from there, but the aviary was located in the very center of Aerie Peak for a reason. Falstad stopped at the graveyard to hang a new feather from the tree grown atop his family grave, but didn’t linger. None of his immediate kin had died recently, thankfully.

After that, it was straight in to meet the dwarf in charge.

There, because Falstad’s job apparently wasn’t stressful enough already, High Thane Kurdran Wildhammer decided his cousin would be the perfect face for the meet-and-greet.

“I felt the uproar of the elements same as you, cousin. Of course the humans will also be in a tizzy no matter how spirit blind they are, whatever it was happened in their lands. I’m just surprised the mess is spilling over from the north instead of west. If old Grayfeather say they’ve got strange secrecy magic too, we need to get to the bottom of this.”

Falstad’s belief was once again vindicated, that the High Thane position existed just so the one stuck with it could take it out on the rest of ‘em for forcing his arse into that chair. Which was fair enough, but what did Kurdran expect? Spend his life with his bum out the window while someone else did the paperwork? As if!

Sometime later, Falstad was debating whether to put on his good clothes or just go as normal. Gryphons could carry a lot, but maneuvering in the air was a different matter, never mind fighting. Also, he’d long since developed resistance to all but the most infernal chill thanks to his woad tattoos. A Wildhammer gryphon rider wasn’t considered veteran until he could go about his duties completely naked. Few ever went that far, you had to keep some modesty reserved just for the missus at home, but still.

With the leather-and-brass arm rings he wore on his upper arms, which teleported his stormhammer back into his hand after he tossed it at some beastie’s head, Falstad didn’t need anything else…

But there was still more snow than not, outside, and at that height it would stay white for another couple of weeks before the springmelt set in. Then, too, the passes only got a direct view of the sun around noon, so they were particularly packed with white still. Also, when the spirits themselves got told off for spying and complied, you had to give some credit to those claims that your incoming guests were important.

Time to chew the ice, I suppose.

Falstad settled on a crocolisk leather tunic with straps and buckles of cobalt-alloyed nickel, turtle shell shoulder pauldrons bound with the same, his most comfortable boots – made of chimera leather – and his regular leggings which were made of wildvine-soaked grizzly boar hide with primal reinforcements. He had a fancy helmet, but he didn’t want the hassle of wrestling his hair through it, and he’d sweat like hells if he did – that was why he wore most of his hair shaved except for the ponytail at the back.

Thankfully, that was the most difficult part over with, since Kurdran had decided to assemble the diplomatic team himself. Technically, even alone Falstad was enough to fulfil diplomatic obligations, being Kurdran’s heir presumptive and also one of the initial contenders for his seat, unfortunately. Falstad still didn’t know who’d put his name forward back then, but when he found out there would be hell to pay.

When he returned to the aviary, Gavan Grayfeather turned out to have talked himself into the group, which Falstad had expected. He was no shaman or wise dwarf, which this whole thing seemed like as not to need.

What he did not expect was to see Elder Mastran there too. That dwarf was a living cultural treasure, one of only two dwarves in the entire Wildhammer kindred old enough to have been alive for the War of the Three Hammers. Most elders didn’t reach 250 years, but he was pushing 280 – he hadn’t just been alive for that war, he’d fought in it from start to finish. And that wasn’t even when he lost his eye, that came a lot later, practically his retirement story.

Could still walk fine too, more or less. And boy, could that dwarf talk, not a day went by without him telling stories to the little ones around the Great Hearth. Falstad had been one of them himself, in his time.

The day Mastran passed and they had to choose someone else to play Greatfather Winter during Winterveil would be a right sad day indeed.

Hopefully it wouldn’t be today after they found out the hard way that he wasn’t fit to fly no more.

“Go easy on me, won’t you lad?” The whitebeard said with a crooked smile. “I can practically hear you trash-talking me in your head.”

“Not at all, Elder,” Falstad said with the straight face that all beardlings perfected before their twentieth year as a matter of self-preservation against promised mortification. “Just wonderin’ if we were waitin’ on anyone else.”

“Nay, you will have to settle for us two I’m afraid.”

“Right then. Let’s be off.”

Thankfully, Mastran proved stable enough in the saddle so Falstad wasn’t doomed to become the dwarf most hated by the next generation on their return to Aerie Peak.

Since the First Wing was for protecting the High Thane and his keep, Falstad took the Second Wing with him. Those six landed first, forming a semicircle right inside the kill zone. Falstad, Gavan and Mastran landed inside that perimeter right after that. They didn’t dismount.

A respectable distance away from the invisible border line, the big lad in charge got up from an armchair of all things. Then, accompanied by his manservant and squire and six of his own knights all on horses, he came over on foot and sweet buggering fuck he was big. Even up there on Hersa’s saddle, Falstad had to look up at him and he wasn’t even in the best hammerthrow distance yet, gods damn.

Falstad didn’t have the consolation of build this time either, braw was as wide as them dwarves at the shoulders, and hips too, had muscle on him for days even, this was ridiculous! He’d heard the trader talk about them supposed sea-faring giants, but he thought they were a tall tale!

Bloody elder races, we already know we’re small and stunted, no need to rub it in!

Maybe Falstad should be all gung-ho about the whole Explorer’s League thing. Then maybe he’d be there when they found their makers and ask them what the hell they were thinking making them so damn small! No, the fact that gnomes and gobbos existed didn’t make it any better!

“Halt, humans!” barked Falstad when he was sure his hammer throw wouldn’t miss. “You encroach upon the lands of the Wildhammer Dwarves! State your business!”

The big lad in charge obligingly stopped, made to speak, paused, then changed his mind with a twist of his lips that was damn right rascally. “Commander, introduce me.”

“Dwarves of the Wildhammer kindred! You stand before his saintship, Ferdinand Wayland Hywel Rogasian, the bright and the holy, the brave and the merciful, maker and unmaker, redeemer and punisher, bane of tyrants, protector of the just, speaker to gods! Avenger of Tyr, friend to Odyn, herald of change who wields the Spark of Destruction by right of lore! Witness the slayer of thraxxi and black drakks, who descended into the last place the Ancient Watchers walked in step and put an end to Zakajz the Corruptor with the Sword of Kings! Be thou daunted, for you stand before the sworn foe of the Black Empire of Ny'alotha, whose foul masters wreaked the vile predations that laid low your fatherland! And lo, be thou blessed evermore, for you are in the presence of the Prophet of the Flame Imperishable, from whence springs eternal into the universe the Holy Light of Creation!”

And in the pass of Aerie-Darrowmere, enfolding at once the most civilized of men and wildest of dwarves, there was total stunned silence.

…

Holy moly!

A cult!

We gotta fly back, we need more hammers-!

“Did ye aye, now?” Elder Mastran said with all the composure that Falstad found himself having lost. “Those’re some right tall boasts, laddie, how many can ye actually prove?”

“I can heal your eye,” the big lad – Ferdinand? Ferdinand claimed as if it was just some paltry no nothing, who was this galoot-?! “Anything else would be rather damaging.”

“To who?!” Falstad barked, before clearing his throat in the face of the confused glances he got for his outburst over – to be stunned stupid by soddin’ words like in fairy tales, what the bloody sod was that speech?! “Dangerous to who, ye or us?”

“The region.”

Well boggin.

“And what would that there involve, ‘xactly?” Mastran asked as if the promise of a literal miracle next to the threat of the end times didn’t faze him none. “Not scoops and knives, I hope?”

“My hand on your face for a couple of seconds.”

He’s off 'is head, if the humans’ Light could do that we’d know by now, and so quick, it couldnae be true!

“That’s a wee much to ask between strangers,” Mastran said diplomatically, because everyone else on their side seemed too off their faces to join in. Fine for the other gryphon riders, they were just there to look dangerous, but what the heck was Grayfeather gawping at? “Don’t know what it’s like with ye humans, but we prefer a wee adjustment period, as it were. We don’t let just anyone into our personal space, saint or not.”

“Understandable.” Ferdinand held out a palm, on which his manservant promptly placed a silver tray he’d drawn from – somewhere, and a bunch of goblets around a bottle of- “Shall we partake in guest rite, then? Neither of us holds claim on this ground, but it should be fine if we both offer, no? I’m told Lordaeron wine is pretty good.”

He’s told-?

“Aged forty-two years, sir,” the Knight-Commander reported dutifully. “We never export anything older than ten, though the king and queen sometimes send bottles as gifts.”

He’s right, Falstad thought testily. The only aged bottle we ever got was a gift at Kurdran’s inauguration and the stingy cunt only let me have a sip, they know exactly how to yank a dwarf’s beard, these – these bawbags!

Falstad abruptly realized everyone on his side was waiting on him. “Grayfeather!”

At his shout, the shaman snapped out of whatever it was.

“Ye fine, or do we need to go back?”

“What? Oh! No, no, don’t mind me, I was just distracted for a little spell there.”

That made Ferdinand smile for some reason and he did a wave-

Vapour and steam whirled into view around his hand, hot and blurry and with two laughing eyes Falstad felt on his very soul when they passed over him – a spirit! – before the apparition dispersed with the most delicious smell of mama’s soup.

The hells?

“Roilbroth accepts your challenge,” the big lad told Grayfeather as if – what challenge? When did they have an entire second conversation? “Unless you’d like to back out? He can be spiteful.”

“Such are spirits,” old Gavan said with that put-upon shamanic serenity that everyone who ever attended the solstice bash knew was completely fake. “It guarantees nothing.”

“Of course you’d say that, the contest is rigged your way because you’re the only arbiter of your personal taste.”

“Well I never, to see the day Gavan Grayfeather gets called a liar! Rest assured that if he does treat me to the best food I ever tasted, I will readily say so.”

Oh, is that what we’re talking about now?

“That’s a bit much to take on faith between strangers,” the lad turned Mastran’s earlier words back on them, no lavvy heid this one, more’s the pity. “Well, that settles it! We’ll have a party, right here, right now!”

“Eh!?” Falstad balked. “How the heck didja get from one to the other?’

“Well I’d think it’s rather obvious,” the lad said while opening the wine bottle and pouring some over a bowl of bread cubes, what was he thinking doing that, such a waste! “We need to build up to it, therefore, a party.”

Falstad wondered when he’d missed yet another part of the conversation. “Build up to what?” No wait, they’d been talking about trust-

“An offer you won’t want to refuse.” The big lad picked up the bowl of winebread and came forward with the offering, stopping with the tip of his foot just outside the invisible border exactly. “And the healing of course, I can’t in good conscience pass through here and not do something about the elder’s eye – and your stress too of course, mister…?”

Falstad, belatedly, realized that none of ‘em had ever given their names even though the humans had. Well, this one had. “These are elder Mastran Thundermantle and shaman Gavan Greyfeather, and I’m Falstad Wildhammer, commander of the Second Wing.” It was the lesser of his titles, but it was safest that way. “Ye can heal stress?”

“Your hormones are practically screaming their triumph into the void, it’s a nasty sight.”

Did this numpty bawbag just call him a–

A whore! That moans! He’ll kill’im!

“Derived from the alteraci word ‘hormon’,” bawbag said with unrestrained fun at Falstad’s expense. “It means to set in motion.”

That oversized whelp! Moppet! Jackanape! Bastard was poking fun of him on purpose and wasn’t even pretending not to feel all gloating about getting one over him, the swash!

Falstad Wildhammer sneered, then nudged Hersa forward, ripped a piece out of that moist bread and crushed it in his teeth while trying not to weep over his first taste of this great beverage being spoiled by grain, why were humans like this?

Bummer, shoulda made him have some first, what if it’s poisoned?

Oh... Feh!

No one was gonna claim Falstad Wildhammer was the only whopper around!

“-.  .-“

“And then ‘e says – see, there’s a human who walks into a tavern, an’ there’s an elf there – an’ – an’ she – snrk – she says – eheh – ahahahahahahahahaha!” Falstad slapped his knee laughing so hard he cried, that joke got better every time he thought about it!

Och, to think he’d been so worried over nothing! These manlings were great! Sure, they were clearly lying about everything, that speech had been way too rehearsed, and their names! All of ‘em that he drank with used fake ones, and they didn’t feel shame none over it! Magroth the Defender, Sage Truthbearer, Headsman Forlorn, Dagren Shadeslayer, Agamand the True, all of the rest with something just as put upon! Nobody gave sprogs such ridiculous names as these! All of ‘em had a Sir in front of their names too, but not a one he asked said they’d gotten the title from someone not part of their – whatever it was! Gallow birds all of ‘em, or soon to be gallow birds, or a cult, or – or something!

But they knew how to have fun, and most importantly they knew how dwarves had fun!

“An’ then the look on ‘is face!” Falstad was still roaring with laughter even hours later. “Bastard got me demoted and thought I’d be all broken up, tried to make it worse with bad jokes when I wasn’t! I was dancing jigs in my head!” Hilarious, if only it had lasted! “An’ then he didn’t last a moonturn in my place ‘afore I had to step back up, the useless numpty! Thank the Makers for building that fool, what a blessing for the dwarfish race – NOT! And the team he brought with ‘im, where did he find ‘em all?! You know how much harder it is for a whole bunch to be that unfailing bad than for ‘em to occasionally be good just by accident? Even the math didn’t add up! He single-handedly lowered my standards and my expectations, a bloody factory of sadness, the whole lot of ‘em!”

“Ah yes, the Peter principle,” pretty boy nodded understandingly as he filled Falstad’s mug again, something ambery this time. “Good to see you lot don’t have to learn that lesson the hard way.”

“How ya figure?” Quaff quaff quaff, och this beer, not as fine as the wine but Makers-!

“Someone does well in their job, so they get promoted. They do well in that job, so they get promoted. They don't do well in that job, so they stay there and do badly forever. Being a good fighter or a good builder doesn't mean someone knows how to lead an army. Being able to do the job and bothering to do the job are very different things too. We humans call it ‘promotion to your level of incompetence.’”

“Hahaha, tha’ss ezzactly right!” Falstad slammed the mug back down on the table and gave a hearty belch, mm-mm, what else they got? Ohhhh, firewater come to papa, from plums! “Take it from me, lad: ye want a good leader, forget the fussy types! Ye want ‘em blunt, ye want ‘em mad as a hatter, and they gots to know what the hell they’re doing which means they gots to put in the work!”

“Or the smart and lazy, right? Because they’ll come up with ways to make everything more efficient.”

“Sod that coddly nonsense, when ye’re in charge ye put up or shut up and get the fuck outta the way!”

“Like you?”

“Damn right!”

“I see now, I was worried for nothing.”

“Eh?”

“Well, maybe not nothing, just not the right thing I should’ve been worried about-“

“Not yer riddles again, speak plain or get!”

“My mistake, I’ll gladly talk all about your ‘whore moans’ again if that’s what you want.”

“Hear that?!” Falstad hollered for all the dwarves and humans to hear, and the horses and gryphons too because why the hell not?!  “He’s one of ‘em ‘don’t promote me too much’ types, he just admitted it!”

“Well then, I suppose it’s just as well I got here when I did,” pretty boy shook his head and tugged on that pansy arse beard of his as if it was worth the – wait!

Hold the horn! “Wassat s’pposed to mean?”

“Normality,” the big lad said slowly. “Or do you expect me to believe you’re drunk just from a few carafes?”

“Bite yer tongue!” Falstad balked on reflex, before what the human actually said caught up with him. “Hey wait, no, say that again.”

“Oh, I think you heard me fine.”

Looking around, Falstad saw that everyone was… still fairly right merry, but everyone nearby who was from his side was tossing him glances now and then. Even the elders, both of whom were at the same table with them and looking right worried. “What with those looks?” Falstad hadn’t forgotten about them, no sir! “Don’t mind them longbeards, longshanks, they’re nowhere as uptight as they put on! Why else would they host the decennial in Kirthaven, of all places?”

“Is that some holy place, or-“

“Some holy place he asks, it’s the holy place, our spiritual core that is!”

“And you hold regular revels there?” Pretty Boy glanced at Grayfeather. “How do the shamans not burst a blood vessel?”

“Hah!” Falstad laughed heartily. “They’re the ones who keep the beer an’ mead flowin’! How do ye think they get their apprentices? Lads and lasses drink an’ drink an’ go from bellow to mellow, an’ then suddenly the hall’s a frenzy with the rambles an’ babbles of boys ‘n girls on a mare’s nest of a shared vision quest!”

“Can I assume that you’ve partaken in this mead of poetry yourself.”

“An’ I’ll damn well enjoy it this year too!”

“You clearly need it,” Grayfeather muttered.

“What’s that?” Falstad snapped. “Say it to me face, if ye’re brave enough!”

The old shaman looked at him aghast. Next to him, Elder Mastran did too. Beyond them, the two gryphon riders that made sure to stay within shouting distance because they didn’t forget their training balked at the display he put on too.

Belatedly, it occurred to Falstad Wildhammer than he’d just snapped at one of the two most venerable longbeards this side of the Thandol Span as if they were striplings on their first flight.

Suddenly, everything that happened since about… one hour into the bash began to squeeze Falstad’s mind in a different shape. How – long ago even was that – when had the sun come down? “… What did ye do to me?”

“Only what I said and what you agreed to, I healed your stress,” the big lad was speaking all cautious too, now. “I had no idea there was so much, or how long it must’ve…”

It certainly hadn’t felt bad, when that gold light knocked all his screws loose.

“Lad,” Mastran said worriedly. He had both eyes working now, when did that happen? “When’s the last time you took any time off?”

“What’s this now?”

“You don’t get literally high on feeling normal unless it’s the farthest thing from normal,” Pretty Boy said bluntly. “The wrong way.”

Falstad blinked owlishly, feeling like his brain was wrapped in cotton that had been straining to hold it in until it suddenly deflated. His brain, not the straps. His body… was all jittery too, the bloody ‘ells, since when did he get the shakes?

“And there’s the crash,” Pretty Boy murmured, before Falstad felt some invisible force abruptly hold him in place. “Easy now, small friend, that’s just to hold you upright. We don’t want anyone to see you have a fit.”

“That’s it!” Pretty Boy’s slavish manservant suddenly yelled from clear across the camp, standing up to loom over the rest of the riders. “A drinking contest, you four against me, right here, right now!”

Such a boast couldn’t not cause the biggest ruckus. Soon enough, everyone was absorbed with the new development, which coincidentally – feh! – distracted them from Falstad’s rapid loss of composure, what the fuck was happening-?

“Go on, you two!” Mastran shouted at the last two riders, the ones standing close just in case. “You can’t let such a challenge go unanswered! Or do you still need your elders to defend clan honor?”

“Yes, Elder!” “No elder!”

The embarrassment of stumbling over their replies made the last two scamper off in a rush, leaving Falstad to the mercy of… the last people in the world that he wanted to see him have a fit of jimjams, what the hell was –? It had to be something the humans did, not – but then, would the Elders just play along with it? They weren’t just playing along.

Mercifully, Pretty Boy and the Elders got talking between themselves after that, waiting him out while he had his – whatever it was in peace. The invisible force seemed to loosen from around him too, but it was only replaced by – wind? Like the air formed an invisible cushion around him, safeguarding his dignity every time he would’ve twitched. Or fallen out of his chair.

Not one of them oversized mannish chairs either, sods had come prepared for that too.

Makers’ balls, Falstad thought, still muddle-headed. Maybe I do need some time off.

Too much time later, the dwarf finally had control of both his wits and his body again. The merriment was in full swing everywhere around him, especially the right hollery drinking contest. Normally… no, not normally. Now that he’d been confronted over it, Falstad realized he’d not joined in on… anything of the sort for way too long. Used to be he’d be the first to join in and the last to cheer on the way out, but not for months now. A whole year even, maybe, buggerin’ bowfins, had it really been so long?

The momentary impulse to fix that right this moment flittered across his brain, to jump up and off his chair and go to put his mug in the game.

He couldn’t find motivation for any of it. “Ey you. Big boy,” he grunted. “What do you lot really want?”

“Okay, we’re finally doing this I suppose,” Pretty Boy said with way too little worry. “Was hoping we’d at least-“

“Ye wanted to build up to it and we let ye, but I’m this close to not appreciating it anymore. No more bender-wilders. Why are ye here?”

“I’m going to cleanse Grim Batol.”

…

That –

“Naturally, I assumed you’d want to be there for it.”

That – was the most preposterous thing he’d ever heard, that anyone in the entire Wildhammer kindred ever heard, wild, absurd, utterly mad, preposterous– !

“We’ll be detouring by way of Uldaman first, since Odyn has some things to take care of there. It’s not directly related, but I figure you’ll want some observers for that too, seeing as it’s where you dwarves all come from and all. The gnomes too.”

Falstad looked up at the big man and stared blankly at him.

The human-

Ferdinand stared back. His gaze held inside a radiant golden glow that promised to destroy every certainty Falstad ever had, if he stared in those eyes too long.

He looked away. Looked around, for the punchline to – whatever joke this was. And when Grayfeather and Mastran didn’t have one for him, being just as speechless at the sheer audacity of what the human had just claimed, Falstad looked farther to see who else he could tear a new one.

He was about to decide who among the fake knights looked most stand-offish, when by chance he saw the old man he’d wondered about all that morning and the man looked ba-

Falstad Wildhammer’s mind was swept aside to the sound of trumpets and striking thunder, and his entire self was witnessed by a colossal being that looked down on him from a throne of iron.

Reality returned at the end of his fall to earth. The music was gone. The shouts were gone. The wine had stopped flowing, the beer had stopped pouring, the revelry – had ceased the moment he fell out of his chair, stunned and breathless. What – he’d seen – felt – burden, judgment, woe unaccountable, great, massive, titanic! Borne alone, by a being of wrath and woe stoked over ages countless!

Gavan and Mastran helped him up. Picked him off the ground, lifted him, held him upright because his legs wouldn’t work. His breath – fits and starts, like his thoughts, crushed flat by a mere glance from – from –

“Blindi,” the voice of- “What did you do?”

“Nothing intentional,” the old man said– his voice – the first time– “But I think we found your next paladin.”

Falstad looked wildly at the humans, and their leader who was so sure and tall and wanted – but suddenly seemed just as small and insignificant as Falstad himself was.

The thought brought anger, and the life back to his limbs, and his lungs, but when he dug for what scraps of courage he still thought he had, he didn’t find it. “Everyone back!” Falstad screamed hoarsely, not even knowing why. Falstad Wildhammer had never been the sort to flee from an enemy, but now, here, he found himself the sort to flee from friends. He backed away frantically, out of the elders’ hold, away from – from - “Back to yer gryphons, we’re leaving!”

“What-“ “The sod happ-“ “Who-“

“NOW! RIGHT NOW, BACK TO AERIE PEAK RIGHT NOW, NOW, GO, GO, GO!!”

They obeyed him, even the elders did as he told them, screamed at them, they scampered back to their startled gryphons in abject confusion, away from the humans who watched them with caution and surprise, save the one – and two! The first! And last!

The dwarves flew away like death was stalking them, back to the Aviary, back to Aerie Peak where Falstad landed first, dismounted first, fled first, not overland but down, down and further down, into the deepest tunnels and beyond even them, to the passage that only the High Thane and his most trusted knew. The tunnel only made in case they had to run away, like Khardros Wildhammer had run away from –

Grim Batol! Grim Batol!

Their lost home, their second lost home, the home who’d held them just to fail them and good riddance, good bloody riddance, it was good riddance, wasn’t it? With its grand vaults and majestic spires and the old guard who lost two wars in a row because they were too busy chasing useless dreams of being the new bluebloods. Bluebloods. Blue blood. Blue blood! The god on the throne bled blue blood!

Blood instead of a beard, seeping from wounds open and fresh, bleeding, many, countless, pouring blood as blue as ink from countless breaks in jadestone skin! Blue blood! Bluebloods, is that where the word came from? Were the dwarves like that too? Did they bleed blue too, once? How? Why? When?

Uldaman, where you come from.

“What the – who – Falstad! Makers’ breath, is this where you’ve been, I’ve been turning Aerie Peak upside down looking for you, how did you get in here? Wait -” Kurdran stalled mid-run, rushing to close the secret wall that Falstad had left half-open in his mindless haste to – to-

“Cousin!” the High Thane shook him by the shoulders, violently. “Talk to me! What did those humans do?!”

“The Makers,” Falstad said woodenly, turning to meet his cousin’s gaze with sightless eyes.  “The Makers. They’re real. And they’re here.”

Bylaws of Babel - Chapter 5

A really long one this time, phew. Not entirely

Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time - Chapter 13

Ran a couple days over my imaginary deadline be

The Unified Theorem - Chapter II.1

Power outages continue to be my bane, but someh

Progress Update

Won't be able to do any extra fourth story this month after all, unfortunately. As for Unified Theorem, you can thank interminable power outages for why it's taking so long. Between starting this post and finally publishing it, power went out three different times.

The update will still be done, so the full set of three will be properly finished for the month, but not for another little while.

Sorry about that, and thanks to those of you who are sticking around.

Bylaws of Babel - Chapter 4

A surprising upset that nobody (including myself) saw coming. 

====================================================

Chapter 4 – Atra-Hasis Envies Your Easy Service

“-. Hrami .-“

The trees spoke to him.

They told him of people approaching, too few to be the bulk of the clans, too many to risk ignoring. Hrami was glad he’d already grown new grass over the many caches of lanterns and blasting powder. They were carefully spaced so the latter wouldn’t easily destroy the former, and with thick shells of hard wood magically grown around the lanterns for good measure. He’d also stashed the cart behind the Monolith, under a wall of brambles he made look as natural as possible.

There were a lot of brambles around the place already, despite that the Monolith was a lone, isolated pillar at the center of a loose stone circle on top of a round hill with no other living things for five hundred paces in every direction. Well, nothing until he arrived and made the whole place green and flowery, though that was as much as he dared risk with the tainted emanations of the Monolith so close.

The trees spoke to him, but he had to walk quite a ways to get to them first.

Hrami himself settled down at the foot of the monolith, and spent the day it took the newcomers to arrive on spreading well-fed roots all through the ground for a mile around him, ready to take the load off some of his spells. Well, one of them. There should be ways to conjure throngs of gnarled beasties even without them, or a forest of thorns depending on what worked. He hadn’t been able to experiment with all possible spells of the Green Wind, but it wasn’t like he could do that much more permanent harm to himself than he already had.

Short of death, anyway.

The thought made a shiver of dread rush through him. More so now than before, when he was still fool enough to look forward to the Schemer’s ‘reward’ once he died and the monster claimed his soul.

He’d known that his former peers would be the most immediate threats we would face. But he’d also thought they’d have no more than the usual reasons to measure egos. His experience as the Liar’s servant should have let him play at being his old self, work with them to prepare the grounds until the time came to strike. With the shamans of the Stormravens and Crow-Brothers off on the raids, there would have been no Tzeenethians to see through him, other than maybe the odd apprentice whose threat was inconsequential.

He was sitting on a Throne of Vines when the newcomers finally stepped into sight. A score of them divided into four groups, not evenly but each led by one of four chaos sorcerers. They’d timed their arrival to just after the sun became visible in the sky, when the morning mists were thickest. That way, when they became visible to the naked eye they were already close enough to cast.

Hrami had tracked their every step regardless, because the grass spoke to him too, especially the one he grew himself over the past few days.

He had half a mind to play his role anyway. Greet his rival shamans with the expected mix of respect and mockery, maybe joke about them paying homage before his throne. It would be what the old him would have done.

But the trees of Norsca had deep roots, and they talked to each other in great detail even if they didn’t know what was important and what not. He knew these men had intercepted the others in his party and extracted what they wanted from them.

He just sat in his throne, eyes closed, seemingly asleep.

“Hrami of the Mammoth Rider clan,” one of them said, the Nurglite of the Gift Givers called Groven ‘Leper-Face’. One of five vitki pretenders that were all chaos sorcerers in truth, like he had been. “We know your plight.”

“Bullshit.” Hrami didn’t move, even to open his eyes. “We never know half the shit we claim.”

“Weak faith is hardly uncommon these days,” said Beata of the Man-Flayers, the greatest threat among all of them. He’d know the voice of that wanton Slaaneshi whore anywhere. “I’m not surprised you’d be one of them, though, with the way you look.”

Green skin, sharp fangs, constantly growing hair and even faster growing nails, Hrami did look a sight.

“Still smells better than you do,” the third among them told the whore, himself another nurglite. Hrami didn’t know this one, which meant he was a weakling “But she speaks true twice over, even if she doesn’t know it, Mammoth Rider.”

“We know your plans,” the first fuck spoke again.

“You don’t know shit.” There were no spells working to undo the wooden shells around the lanterns, or holes dug up where the blasting powder had been buried, they’d even walked over several spots on the way over.

“Come back to the Four, Mammoth Rider,” Leper-Face pressed with a buzzing undertone to his voice. “The Gods do not forget, but may yet forgive.”

For a moment, Hrami honestly considered it even though he knew the Four didn’t forgive. Ever.

The New God might, but…

Hrami had shut that door in his own face.

“The Four are full of shit,” Hrami shocked both them and himself by saying. “What do they do for us that we don’t have to pay ten times over the worth of? Or is it a hundredfold now?”

“You are truly so mad as to discount their power-?“

“They don’t have power for shit if one of us doesn’t give ours so they can pass their wind on this side, and you all know it.”

Their silence was as damning as their subtle movements were a signal to their apprentices to begin coven casting. Not that their words were any better, they weren’t even trying to convince him, it was the Ritual of Broken faith. The moment it concluded they’d all be subject to Malediction Undivided, cutting all who’d turned on the Gods from their bonded spirits.

How ironic that Hrami already labored under that handicap.

“Friends,” Hrami spoke one last time, one lone attempt to reason with people he was no friend with, but compared to whom he himself was no less damned. “On account of our shared suffering, I ask you – please, stand down and let us have peace. It will be earned in carnage, as all the times before. But this time it will be honest, and it will last.”

It had to. For everything he’d gone through to be worth it, it had to. What he was about to-

“You would have us forsake our ways?”

Yes. “I would have us return to our true ways, those of our ancestors who knew better than to willingly become the slaves of spirits whose only purpose is to damn the world and themselves.”

The laughter that served as reply came with a stench of rancid musk. “Unbelievable,” the whore gasped when her fit finished, tossing her disgustingly perfect hair. “You aren’t even trying to hide your heresy. Do you even hear yourself? Where is the great schemer of the Mammoths? Your cleverness has passed along with your sense. To think you yourself said that the servants of the Raven Lord would always know better, ha!”

“I did, and you didn’t know whether to kill or fuck me for -“ Hrami’s eyes snapped open and felt like they melded together before unleashing a beam of deadly emerald energy right in the whore’s face.

The whore died from an exploding head, along with all her apprentices as Hrami turned his head. The sweeping beam got the second nurglite shaman too, and all of his apprentices before the power burst ran out. Twelve and two down despite the strongest magical wards he’d ever seen even before the Silence, the Four themselves must be helping them but his spell still won. It would’ve won even without the entire day’s worth of power collected in his throne.

Fuck me, I really could’ve killed the New God!

His throne sprouted a halo of thorns just in time to skewer the ageing touch spell of a fourth nurglite and a fifth man he’d not perceived at all before that point – the Grey Wind! The last power left in his throne went into a massive spike erupting from its back, skewering that one just before he would’ve disappeared from his senses again. Then Hrami barely had time to drop down through the throne and into the ground, before a stream of blue and green flies spewed where he’d just been from the mouth of the first and most dangerous left.

Four nurgle sorcerers in one place, Hrami thoughts with disdain. Two now, the king still hasn’t forgiven them for doing more harm to us then the enemy, the last couple of raids.

A shame their miscasting problems wouldn’t put him in any less danger here.

Hrami burst out of the earthgate far enough that the mist concealed him. A wall of thorns conjured in the opposite direction distracted from the noise of his re-emergence, but even so he barely had time to manifest a leaf whirlwind and prepare a second spell before he was dodging a stinking jet of putrid blood, pus, maggots, and slime.

Loose drops still reached him, but just barely, and where his clothes didn’t eat the damage his thick hair did, his arcane mutations helping him for once. The Life Wind rebuffed the attached curse of nausea, and the Curse of Thorns he unleashed in response found its mark better. First blood was his thrice over, and now so were the first screams.

That was when the cloud of flies swarmed him from all directions. Only half of them were stymied by the whirling leaves, and his attempt to dismantle the spell only rebuffed it temporarily.

“YoU wiLl bEcoME ToDaY’S saCRifiCe!”

Hrami’s eyes bulged and he almost overdrew on Ghyran in his haste to escape the things through another earthgate.

A repurposed message spell, clever fuck, he thought with a racing heart as he burst from the ground elsewhere, feeling light-headed. They’d have burrowed into me through every hole after they were done talking.

Now he felt nauseous, but he forced it down and managed to dispel a sudden, combined casting attempt to inflict him with pestilence. He used earthgate again to vanish and burst from the ground right in the middle of the apprentices, who’d all joined together in one big coven of hangers-on. The Winds of Magic decided to blow weakly then, not enough to let him dispel such a strong channeling. But this was still the height of summer when Ghyran was strongest, and even if his attack spells were so much more costly, Hrami had clever ways of his own too.

He collected what power he could, and unleased an indiscriminate spell to cure blights in all directions.

The adepts of the Plaguefather fell down screaming in horror as Nurgle’s many ‘gifts’ were purged from their bodies all at once.

Not as present as you’d like, eh ‘Grandfather?’

Unfortunately, they didn’t just fumble the spell they were mingled in, the gathered power erupted in a bright flare of cascading chaos that left Hrami momentarily blind and his ears ringing with a sharp whine and distant screams.

This time, the stream of putrid blood caught him in the chest. Hrami’s roar was as pained as it was enraged, but the foreign screaming in his ears got louder too. The attack had been indiscriminate, half the apprentices were dying agonizing deaths. Hrami threw the Green Wind into the one who’d already died, twisted the Ghyran through his fading life force, and send the newly animated corpse running for his master with intend to hug and spread his agony just like Grandfather Nurgle taught. This worked as a human shield too, but only from the front.

He used an earthgate to change location again.

He almost didn’t manage to come back out of the ground because of the sudden lurch in his stomach and dizziness.

“Nurgleth tua gumuzi henna wurtu!”

Fuck Nurgle’s blessings! Hrami tried to curse only for his words to slur as his tongue rapidly swelled and he felt his insides begin to bloat, his eyes began to bleed –

M-manifest saccred geometry!

The Jade Wind churned inside him. He didn’t know if he pictured the shapes right, or if he was just so lucky that the right sounds came out his mouth from pure luck. The spell of pestilence was broken, but he felt a bit of that corruption settle in him long-term, and the yelling in his ears begin to form something almost resembling proper words. His dizziness was veering into complete shakes, and his nausea was only growing worse.

“Finally feeling it, are you?”

“When-did you-?“

“Every time you fled through the earth.”

What-? Plague winds! These were Nurgle’s minions, the foul winds of Neiglish Rot should have been their opening move, but he didn’t – they didn’t- “You – cast it down – underground-“ Plague winds – no, the Miasma of Pestilence, the foul green mist was finally seeping up from the soil. “Miasma – rot – my roots-” Hrami had spread them throughout the area so he didn’t need to waste spells on moving from place to place-

“Not a bad plan to embed them in the ground ahead of time, being able to change location and cast at the same time might have won you the day. As is, every time you passed through them, you accepted a bit of Nurgle’s gift.” The fucker came over, shaking his head in pity. “Abandoning a mastered lore for a new one, how foolish. It was never going to work in a fight with equals, never mind superiors. Certainly not with just a few weeks’ worth of practice.”

The voice, Hrami thought as the foreign tongue ranted in his ears from no one alive. It’s coming from inside the Monolith. Hrami tried to climb back to his feet, he’d fallen down.

“Bind him.”

Hrami roared in rage and lunged. The unknown Nurglite shaman was too close to escape Hrami’s claws from splitting his throat, and Leper-Face barely had time to widen his own eyes when Hrami was on him, beating him down with his fists, blow after blow after blow even as the last two lads jumped on him, grabbed his arms to try and pull him off, even as the poxy fucker vomited acid and spewed poison and swarms of bloodflies amidst blow after blow after screaming blow-

The man’s skull turned to pulp under his fists.

But fate didn’t consider Hrami’s victory bitter enough, so the fucker broke apart completely in his death throes, bursting into a ravenous cloud of flies and hornets that enveloped him and the last apprentices. The swarm feasted on all of them now, sucking out human blood and injecting rot and poison back in its place. And when they were full, they also burst into splatters of spume and all manner of plagues and venoms, steaming and smoking as flesh sizzled and melted them alive.

Blind, half-deaf and screaming, Hrami didn’t know how he managed to channel Ghyran through any of that. Even then, it only barely kept him alive, writhing on the ground like a squirming maggot until the pain went beyond excruciating into the numb heat of rot all through his flesh. Just prolonged his agony as he died, screaming with the pain and dread of what was waiting for him on the other side, worthless like the rest of his kind, all alone – abandoned-

“You could’ve blown up one or two of the caches,” the voice he hated for so long spoke to him. To his spirit, because Hrami’s eardrums had melted.

Did – did he hear that right? He – wasn’t hallucinat-?

“Even keeping one or two of the gunpowder bombs on hand would’ve been better than this.”

Hrami stared at the ghost-like sandals in front of him. He didn’t know how he pushed himself on his back, but it was the last thing that arm would ever do. “Would’ve – ruined – y’r plans,” he slurred, not sure if the words made it all the way past his tongue.

“Not by much.”

Little Nimrod stood over him in the spirit world and… he… didn’t look little at all anymore. Didn’t look all that divine either, but then… Hrami had never really been able to tell, had he? He’d been worshipping trash spongers.

“If you’re going to turn your back on the crow bastard, then stop setting yourself up to fail and use everything at your disposal.”

“Ends nev’r just’fy th’ means,” Hrami slurred the god’s words back in his face. “Cuz – noth’n ev’r ends.”

“Twist the spirit of my words to the very end, will you?”

“Not – g’nna – live ‘nyway-“

“Yes.” The New God looked down at him, haloed by the bright rising sun. “You will.”

A bloody, mad laugh somehow burbled out of Hrami’s guttering throat. “Sure I am,” his disbelieving laugh turned into a retch. When it finally stopped, he didn’t know how he was still alive. “… Y’ came.”

“I did.”

Hrami’s chest tightened, and not from his rattling heart.

“You went and got me worried for you.”

His eyes stung, and not from acid fumes. “G’nna – save m’ soul too?”

“Yes,” That one word felt like it could make fate itself stop in place. “I will.”

Hrami didn’t know if he was blinking away blood or tears. “Does – tha’ mean I’m – more th’n ‘n an’mal?”

“Yes.” Nimrod sighed in… exasperation? “And if you are, then the rest of you might just be too, curse my soft heart.”

“Then – tha’s – ’nuff-”

“No it’s not. Don’t mind the manticore.”

“Whu?”

The vision of the New God melted away into the sky, just in time for the real one to land in the same spot in the flesh, glowing like sunflame from within. “Don’t resist,” he commanded as he landed on one knee. “You don’t have time for it.”

Nimrod stabbed his bare fingers into Hrami’s pus and acid-spewing chest, pried his ribcage open, then used a glowing nail to carve a word into his heart. The thing – the feeling –

This is how he did it? The man thought faintly. How he – again – what use even am I like th-?

“Do you know why humans can’t use more than one Wind of Magic?”

Hrami jolted awake from – out of – what-?

“It’s not just a matter of study time, or those geniuses that master a wind in a year or two would have all eight under their belt by the time they’re twenty. No, the reason is different, and it’s a large part of why I passed on to you every spell and trick of Ghyran as soon as I learned them in my astral wonderings. I wanted to figure it out, and you were the perfect opportunity to observe the effects as they came. Now, I understand – the human tendency toward crippling overspecialization isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. Just like the body creates scabs to seal open wounds, or antibodies to fight illness and prevent their return, the Arcane Mark is the spirit’s own autoimmune response.”

Magic – was dangerous – even minor miscasts could be disastrous –

“Yes, the Arcane Mark not only reduces the consequences from fumbled casting, it outright prevents someone from accessing any of the other seven winds at all.”

The New God… Hrami could feel him now, like he used to before, but it didn’t feel as oppressive even… even as his spirit grew, and Hrami’s own grew alongside even though he was dyi-

“I first thought it was a sign of the person becoming closer to an elemental being, but it’s the opposite – the Warp tries to create one out of us, an elemental or daemon will even attempt to possess or fuse with the person in the most extreme cases of overdrawing on the Winds. But the spirit acts on our instincts of self-preservation and selfhood, and when it fails to outright expel the energy because we – it – is the one actively pulling it in, it settles for the least bad alternative. Twists that energy into a defense mechanism instead.”

Hrami felt a different twist in him. With impossible clarity and understanding, he felt the Jade Mark unwind and dissolve, along with his uncontrollable hair growth and green skin and sharp fangs and nails, and all the protections it gave from fumbled spells too – no, not just unwind, reknit somehow as-

“In this way, the one wind we pulled too much of into ourselves becomes the power source for the permanent insulation from all the others. This is why humans can’t access multiple winds after that, and also… where resistance to spells and magic originates.”

As Nimrod drew – made Hrami draw – overdraw on a completely different Wind, an all-new arcane mark formed, colored purple like sunset. It felt like the inexorable passing of time. Hrami felt it as he became insulated from the Jade Wind he’d used all this time too, but only for a moment. The Shyish arcane mark was undone just like the first.

With such speed that Hrami felt his Ond grow sore in ways he never thought it could, Nimrod locked him into and out of all eight winds one after another…

Then he drew on all of them at once, such that Hrami felt he might explode as eight arcane marks formed at the same time, before Nimrod himself drew on dhar and fed it to… so much… impossibly balanced, no misalignment or corrupting taint-

The presence of all eight arcane marks resonated as a single structure, and suddenly Hrami felt himself, body soul and spirit, shake loose every last spell, curse and corruptive contagion afflicting him. All the lingering weaves, and all the traces of a lifetime of wallowing in the spume of the Ruinous Powers.

Did – did he just make me immune to magic?

Nimrod all but confirmed it by having to physically roll Hrami out of the pool of blood and acid spume instead of using spells, except for… some water manipulation to clean him and all the space nearby of all remaining sickness, poison and filth.

The eight winds – he can – he just – getting all the marks cuts you off from all of them? Protects you from all of them, from magic being used on you at all? Not makes you a stronger caster? But then – the elves-?

“Troublesome,” Nimrod frowned. “It’s too power-intensive to make permanent, even now that your spirit has grown this much. Don’t know enough to make it stick and allow magic at the same time either, yet. Well, except dhar I suppose. Following the same logic, the eight-fold mark might just be the best and safest way to use it, even the dark elves I spied didn’t have such an easy time with it, that’s why they still need the cult of Khaine and all the rest. I wonder if this is how Nagash did it.”

Who?

With that same… impossible ability to just change what a spirit did, Nimrod dispersed all of Hrami’s arcane marks again, undid all the… protections? Impairments? Until Hrami’s spirit was… impossibly clean and raw, restored… unspoiled like… like…

Like in his earliest, most terrifying memory when he was given to the old sorcerer to train. When he hadn’t yet drawn on the Warp, or any of the Winds or spirits enough to… do anything. Not even to himself.

When Nimrod withdrew his name out of Hrami’s heart, when he released his claim on his self so that Hrami was his own person once again, the man felt a lot more conflicted than the first time around.

But the flood of Ghyran Nimrod sent into him right after washed even that away in a wave of relief so strong that he thought he might start weeping and never stop. It… felt so good to have eyes again. Ears. Innards, lungs, they worked. His skin… it grew back. No pain, gods, there was no more pain.

“This is the best I can do at the moment.” Nimrod sat down next to where Hrami was curled up in a naked, trembling heap because his clothes had been melted along with his skin. His old skin. “Be proud, studying your experience with the Jade Wind is what gave me the most insight required to learn all this. All the same, though, from now on I’ll run these experiments on myself.” The little godling conjured the biggest, fluffiest blanket Hrami had ever touched and wrapped him in it like he was a newborn swaddled for the first time.

He… he couldn’t begrudge it. Kindness, charity, he’d never begrudge them again. A helpless newborn was exactly what he felt like. “You’re-“ he coughed more from shock that he could breathe and speak without agony again, more than anything. “You’re a hard god to please.”

“Am I?”

Hrami felt a shiver wrack his body. He pulled the blanket tighter. If being Tzeentch’s servant taught him any lesson worth keeping, it was to never speak impulsively, especially when answering questions. “I guess not,” he finally admitted. “Not like I proved anything in the end.” Hrami had set himself up to fail. The New God was right, he really shouldn’t have done that. When he gave himself away when talking to that little girl, when he went forward with Nimrod’s plans, it made a deadly confrontation with the others inevitable. Turned the whole mess into a fight of measly survival. Didn’t prove anything, wasn’t shit in anyone’s eyes, never mind a god’s. Except Khorne, maybe, but he didn’t count.

“I’m not Tzeentch. I won’t order you to never lie, but do keep this in mind – if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Nimrod put a hand on Hrami’s forehead and sent a soothing wave of Aqshy into him, banishing the weakness and the cold. “Rest.”

“Aye, Lord.”

Nimrod huffed. “I didn’t ask for worship, I asked you to make me believe in you.”

If only the gods were all like you. “…Did I?”

“Barely.”

Nimrod made to rise, but stopped and looked down at him. Slowly, he reached into a pouch at his belt and pulled out one of those lanterns of his, except tiny and hanging from a chain. A pendant. It felt… Like home never did.

What a sorry life he’s lived.

“Delusional Bird or his minion no doubt has the piece of you that you traded for that crow familiar, so he still has first claim when you die. Since I’m not divine yet, your best hope for a less hellish afterlife is a healthy relationship with someone who is. I recommend the White Dove, she refuses to give up on you lot up here for whatever reason. But I’ll do the best I can by you too. In case my vague plans to summon your pact demon and reclaim that bit don’t work out, though, don’t forget to jump inside the lantern if the time comes.”

Hrami accepted the gift and decided he’d never again look down on pity either.

He watched the little master rise, turn and walk to –

A manticore. It was just over there, snarling and thrashing furiously while bound in a myriad vines. Where did it come from? When? Hrami hadn’t heard anything…

Yes, didn’t hear anything was right. He was blind and deaf until just a minute ago, and the god child did say something about it, right? It wasn’t a hallucination…

“How the fuck?” Hrami still muttered, not seeing anything odd except the vines, even with witchsight. “No way a manticore wouldn’t break out of those things, what did you do to it?”

“Nothing actually, it’s just exhausted,” Nimrod replied in between futile spittle from the thrashing beast. “Dumb thing’s been chasing me for the last hundred and twenty kilometers. It’s the same one that lives in the cave near the Mammoth Rider settlement, not sure what the hell it was doing so far south.” The Amber Wind of magic collected in Nimrod then, concentrating around his eyes and throat. Next time he spoke, instead of words there were growls, hisses, and even a roar when the beast got particularly uppity. It wasn’t particularly easy to understand what was happening mystically, Nimrod glowed fairly bright hot and red for some reason that… didn’t seem to excite the Red Wind. But Hrami experienced the same thing several times over just now, so he could still comprehend the major things.

An arcane mark formed in Nimrod’s aura when he overdrew on the Ghur and transformed into a manticore himself, briefly, to beat and roar the other one into submission. But when he transformed back into a human, Hrami also saw the mark be dissolved and the God child’s spirit returning to its prior, falsely nondescript state.

“Huh.” The boy was more bewildered by an animal than he’d ever been by any human, that Hrami knew of. It would hurt his pride something fierce if he still had one. “It was looking for its old pack, or pride. Whatever this thing was before it was mutated into this creature, it must have lived near or in Bjornling territory before, or was a migratory species. I wonder…” The god child weighed some great decision. “Well, it’s worth testing at least, best do it in controlled conditions instead of a crisis later. Come over here, will you Hrami?”

… That was the first time the god child ever called him by name.

Embarrassingly, Hrami almost couldn’t disentangle the blanket enough to walk properly, almost had to crawl over like a worm. It was all he could do to shuffle over on his feet before falling back down on his arse.

Hrami had no idea what it was that he saw next.

Something that wasn’t the Ond but definitely was Nimrod… extended from nimrod until it engulfed both of them and the creature. Then he-

"̷̢̯͉̱̯̅͂ͅN̸̻̯̼͓͈͊̔̂̚ả̵̢̨͎̺̣̪̲̝͔̦̦̯̦̏̅̇͆̊̈́͂͆̌̉̕m̶̨̙̮͍͈̒́̃͋̋s̶̨̲̭̮̟̀́̊̀͐̈́̈̌͒͒́͛̏̕͜ą̶̬͎͈̼͙̭͓̱̠͗̂̏̓̉̔̾̄̕̚͠ ̴̩̒͝͠Ķ̶̩̲̠͕̳̩̪̺̠̇̅͝ͅa̶̗̲͖͇͒̿͆̽͝ͅl̷̛͇̺͛̎̈́̏̽̔̓̀̑̎̃͘ä̷̢̨̡͈͓̦͓̹͎̲̝̪̼̬́̎̓͌̌͛̄ ̶͖̺̞͇̽̐̅̃͐̚H̷̳͙̦̣̼̓́̄̅̇͛̅̔̓͛͐̑̕a̷̧̖͕̤̭͔̰̤͛͂͗̽ṱ̸̡̢̣̳̦̱̳̥͇͚̫̰͊̐̚ͅā̸͚͉͈͖̠̋͊͗̔̍͗͆̑̂̓̽́̚ͅ!̴̢̨̱̦̦̙͙̘̣͚̺̯̭͂ͅ"̷̢̺̭͆̿͗̏̑̎̈́̿͆̿̆͌́̔̕

-said something that did something to the space inside whatever it was and…

And the manticore aged in reverse, getting smaller and smaller until it squirmed and twisted and fumed a hazy, purple-greenish mist that suddenly popped like a bubble, leaving behind an egg. A great, big egg as big as Nimrod’s head.

“Agh-hnnn,” the boy listed where he stood with a frighteningly real groan. “That… was a lot. Enforcing outcomes against the will of gods is really that hard, huh? Even the most debased of them…”

What was he talking about? What was that? What had he done?

“Huh,” Nimrod said on finally seeing the result of his…

Not a spell, it was more than a spell, this was a miracle.

The boy picked up the egg.

The egg promptly hatched explosively into…

“Wark!”

A baby griffon.

The Small Lord had just turned a chaos monster back into the creature it came from by reversing age.

Not divine my arse.

“Huh,” Nimrod repeated himself, another thing he’d never done with a human. Guess that when he said some animals were more noble than people, he’d been as truthful as every other time. Apparently.

The god child held up the wet, baby lion eagle from under the arms. It wiggled. “So that’s where manticores come from.”

Chaos stealing babies. A tale as old as the Eye in the North. Even older, now that the thing was gone.

Good riddance.

“I wonder if manticores can spawn from other things, do you know?”

Hrami only belatedly realized he was the one being addressed. “That’s the prevailing wisdom, but some think it’s them sorcerers in the fortresses up in the Chaos Wastes that make’em.”

Well, used to make, maybe, with the Chaos Wastes being just normal wastes now. Or soon would be.

“Perhaps the variance in manticore anatomy is caused by the different animals they mutate from. Ah well.” The boy cradled the… actually very large creature to his chest with some difficulty, the cub was almost as big as a grown dog. Only a middling sized dog, but still a dog. “Even as a mutated monster you looked for your family, huh? Lions live in prides and eagles mate for life, guess even the Runious Powers can’t completely twist such a strong blend of instincts. That’s a good… girl, apparently.” The boy had no trouble holding it with a single arm while the other scratched it under the beak. “Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl, that’s right, you are, that’s who.”

“Wark!”

“Look, Hrami, isn’t she cute? This is why the Ruinous Powers are complete morons, who’d want to lose all this just to make a scary rage monster? I’m going to make you sapient the first chance I get, oh yes I will. Then I’ll find a boy griffon and make him into a person too, and then you can be fruitful and multiply into a whole race of wonder griffons.”

Hrami was hard-pressed not to gape.

Holy shit, he thought in realization. He isn’t just pretending to be a child, he really is one!

The rest of what happened until the return of the raid didn’t make much more sense. Nimrod made Hrami show and explain where and why he buried what he buried, and he thought it was well enough done. The blasting powder was scattered around where the King, Jarls and most distinguished warriors generally stood during the events, most of the lanterns under where the sacrifice was going to be to save as many of the souls as possible.

Despite that, the Small Lord decided they wouldn’t be going through with it.

“What?” Hrami was dumbfounded. “Why? I mean, not that this isn’t exactly what I wanted-“ But was it really?

“It’s well done, don’t worry. It’s not easy to change the entire course of your life, especially when it goes against everything you’ve been so abusively indoctrinated into. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m not weak enough anymore, that I need to settle for just choosing between bad options. I’ll just make a new option of my own. I know exactly how to do it.”

“How’s that?”

“By taking a page from the book that my father was wise enough to leave unwritten.” Which explained absolutely nothing. “Just the one though.”

Nirod didn’t explain anything else, but he did lead him off on a circuitous path through hills and woods until they were on the opposite side of Graelholm from the Monolith. It was a good day’s march, but it finally made the ranting in Hrami’s ears disappear. He’d thought it was warp corruption from the fumbled spells earlier, but apparently not.

“The monolith is more than you know,” Nimrod said cryptically. “It certainly doesn’t belong to this Katam fellow, he just got his skull bound to the thing somehow, was probably trying to become immortal. He got his wish, after a fashion.”

Katam? The legendary sorcerer was alive? No, a talking skull? Bound to the monolith somehow? What the fuck? Where? It’s not like the thing had space inside, it was just a damn pillar made of rock, not even that girthy.

“We’ll have plenty of time to look into it when you can defend yourself properly again. Or just after the raid returns, depending on how things go. Until then, you and this little one are better off without his hysterics rattling your brains.”

That, at least, made sense. Not that Hrami was going to give him any grief over it, he was past that stupidity now. He hoped.

The raid finally returned a couple of days later. Just enough time for Hrami to earn himself the Ghyran arcane mark again, though without the physical mutations this time, thank goodness.

The whole time, the Small Lord did… almost nothing at all besides feeding and playing with that griffon baby of. Hrami had to do all the hunting, foraging and cooking for all of them. Or maybe not, Nimrod didn’t tell him to do any of it, he hadn’t… given any new orders at all, actually. Hrami just… felt charitable enough to do it without being asked.

It didn’t make him feel disgusted with himself anymore.

Hrami did get worried when Nimrod didn’t seem inclined to wake up from his meditative trance, though, that morning. The Small Lord just sat there, eyes closed and cross-legged with his hands on his knees, breathing deeply and slowly. Completely heedless of the little griffon crawling up and down his front and back and head, and down and back up again in growing frustration at being ignored.

The man was weighing the costs and risks of shaking him awake when Nimrod tensed, clenched his fists, and snapped awake with a face twisted into something that could only be angry self-recrimination.

“Dammit,” the Small God punched the earth. “I just couldn’t help myself, I just had to play around with the Tongue on a whim. I should’ve waited.”

Hrami cautiously stayed silent.

“No, no. No.” Nimrod seemed to be trying to persuade himself of… of what? Hrami didn’t know. “No, it’s not a lost opportunity. Not forever, it can’t be, not completely, it might come up again. It has to come up again. If it doesn’t, I’ll just make a path to it myself. There has to be away. There is a way, I saw it.”

Hrami stayed quiet and didn’t move, even as the baby griffon sensed the change in atmosphere and hopped away from his parent to hide behind his legs instead.

“And of course, after I try and fail to grasp the slightest ember of light even with everything I have, I learn how to be a ninja for free.”

A ninja? What’s that? And what light was he talking about?

What could he have just seen, to make him sound so bitter?

With a hollow sigh, Nimrod climbed to his feet. The little griffon seemed to decide that meant things were safe, so he pranced over to be picked up. It didn’t cheer the boy up, but he did pick up the little beast and grabbed his beak. Seemed to be the equivalent of a hug for the thing, like biting each other’s snout was for wolves. “Come on, my evil man who wants to be good, let’s you and me go meet the King. Don’t worry, I won’t take this out on you, or anyone.”

‘This’ being what? “Might be a very short meeting anyway,” Hrami warily said instead, falling in step next to the little god.

“That’s fine, I’m not here for him.”

“… You really think you can get through to them?” Even after whatever that was?

“If it was just me, no. Contrary to whatever impression I may or may not given, I’ve never been a particularly gifted speaker. If I were, I wouldn’t have lost the first time.”

Excuse him?

“However, this won’t be the first occasion where I win over a crowd that completely hates me. I’ve lived for so long, witnessed and memorized the words of so many orators far superior to myself, that I have something for just about any situation. Now hold onto this while I do something to banish this foul mood.”

Hrami stared at the baby griffon suddenly in his face.

“Wark.”

“The same to you, brat.” He grabbed the thing as gently as he could. Big mistake, it immediately escaped and sent him on a mad chase up and down the forest all the way to the Grael Hold’s gates.

When he finally caught the thing in a vine trap, when he realized what a complete spectacle he made of himself in front of the gate guards, Hrami the Green swore that would be the first and only time he played such an embarrassing distraction for anyone, god or not.

“-. Nimrod .-“

I saw the Flame Imperishable and fell short.

======================================

“-. Mechanics Discerned .-“

Enforce Decree

Nimrod can spend CP to either force a Eununcia success, make a success into a critical success, or to make a successful Eununcia outcome permanent, all without inviting disproportionate backlash (such as from causality, probability, fate or pissed off hell gods). Cost is 100 CP per syllable, plus an additional 100 CP multiplied by the difference in size category between Nimrod and target, plus an additional 100 CP for every layer of Veil degradation. Basically, Nimrod is combining Eununcia with the Sealed True Name safeguards and Arcane anti-sympathy trait to make the affected thing count as separate from the rest of the universe for the duration of the Eununciation.

Namsa Kala Hata (Flesh Time Undone) = six syllables = 600 CP spent.

1100 CP – 600 = 500 CP

“-. Forms and Failures .-“

Expert Martial Form of the Shadow Emissary (Free, Ninja, Final Fantasy XI, Modus) – Strict training in the forbidden arts of the Far East have transformed the Ninja into cold, hard killing machines. Capable of evading most attacks thrown at them by deceiving their opponents with their mastery of shadows while dealing large amounts of damage with shuriken and spells, making them invaluable on higher level foes.

Exemplary Mythic Path of the Unconquerable Anathema (Failed) (600,  Adamant,            MtG - Throne of Eldraine, Benevolence) – Make no mistake. You are a hero. Within you is the potential to etch your name into the legends of Eldraine, alongside the men and women who carved the Realm from the Wilds and won the throne from the elven princes of eld. Ancient artifacts call for you, generational feuds mend under your hand, and winning the trust of fae, knight, and commoner alike comes naturally to you. The strength of your heart improves and empowers whatever amazing feats you’ve accomplished in your travels here in the following ways:

Giant Killer - > Resolute Rider (Selected) (Equivalent to Grail Knight Blessing)

It is no longer just the tall and mighty that fail to shake you - you are able to withstand the twisting, corrupting nature of the Wilds Warp with the light of your soul, and in fact by summoning forth great righteousness you can create a wreath of power that actively causes further damage to mystical beings. In addition, you are capable of using the light of your soul to create a shield against the claws and spell of those very same beings.

Requires Giant Killer (MtG - Throne of Eldraine) (Sealed True Name + Nimrod’s sheer experience substitutes for this).

In Warhammer terms, Grail Knight Equivalent Ward Save and Chaos Resistance is just the beginning, for the Spirit AND Body, not just Soul as Nimrod had before. If he had this he could’ve come through the Time Capsule Wall instead of needing to come through the Gate and burn his spirit to cleanse himself. It’s basically the Anathema flame, but at level 1 instead of Max like the Emperor has.

Loremage - > Arcanist of the Loch

Your special expertise in both the history of Eldraine and the nature of the Fae has allowed you to go beyond mere gathering of knowledge - discovering ancient spells to add to your repertoire, utilizing natural ambient magic of an area to enhance your own capabilities, and discovering artifacts of power hidden from the past are all within your realm of expertise, allowing you to transform your knowledge into powerful magical capability. Requires Loremage (MtG - Throne of Eldraine) (Unlocked by Synergy with Prior Forms)

Oathsworn - > Deathless Knight (Equivalent Benefits provided by Prior Forms)

Now this is just ridiculous. Simply put, your stores of vitality are genuinely through the roof. If Oathsworn were difficult to put down, you are (barring the use of annihilating flame or being reduced to nothing but pieces and paste) downright impossible to kill with mere blade and bow. You can heal from nearly any wound within a few moments, and your durability is such that the easiest and quickest way to kill you would have to be decapitation followed by the destruction of the head afterwards - one or the other would merely give you a chance to recover your head and place it back on. Requires Oathsworn (MtG - Throne of Eldraine) (Unlocked by Prior Forms)

Irencrag Feat - > Fireborn Knight (new)

Beyond flame and light, you have tapped into a power of the heart that grants you the power of the heavens itself - you can call down lightning with similar capabilities as the Silverflame, and wreathe your weapon in the same - in turn, enhancing the speed and power of your strikes to resemble that of the very electricity you call upon. Requires Irencrag Feat (MtG - Throne of Eldraine)

Tall as a Beanstalk - > Rampart Smasher (Covered by Prior Forms)

If your strength was prodigious before, it’s outright inane now. As a human, you’re large enough to hold a horse beneath each arm, as well as capable of wielding ballista as a handheld weapon, shoulder tackling through solid stone walls, and breaking the necks of castle-destroying dragons with a twist of your wrist. Requires Tall as a Beanstalk (MtG - Throne of Eldraine)

Basically, Nimrod could have gotten four out of these five prestige classes, one of which is basically the first step on achieving the Anathema Power of the Emperor himself. Would also have given him the Grail Knight-level magic resistance that Extremis lacks, and the ability to weaponize it too.

Unfortunately, 500 CP was just not enough for the roll, to his (and my) vast disappointment.

Might just make for a better story this way, though.

…

Let me have my consolation prize, m’kay?

Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time - Chapter 12

King Arthur is French fanfic.

Change my mind.

===============================

Chapter 12: This Is Not the Master You’re Looking For

“-. March 4, 1995 .-“

“How the hell did we win?”

Coming from who might just be the smartest man in the world, that question struck everyone quite hard.

“No, seriously, how?” Charlie Gordon demanded as he waved angrily at Harry’s memory of Washington being eradicated in orbital bombardment, which hung frozen around them in the Room of Requirement’s Pensive space. “If they can do this to the whole world – in one day – how the hell were the Goa’uld kicked off Earth in the first place? For that matter, why didn’t they come back to put us in our place afterwards? They've had spaceships capable of this all along, didn’t they? They didn’t just invent them in the last few years.”

That was correct. Well, except for what minor improvements in efficiency or rate of fire they crawled through over the last ten millennia. Harry had extensive memories as Evan Lorne to confirm it, and not just the ones in that last life where the whole Earth ended in fire. He recalled another life, a different version of that same life during which he served as a member of Stargate Command, and later in the Atlantis Expedition.

In that version of history, on that same uncanny version of Earth where magic didn’t exist, the Americans had been visiting other planets through the Ancient artificial wormhole device since 1945. Well, since 1997 technically, but 1945 was the first time the Stargate was used successfully, by Ernest Littlefield. Then there was another trip in 1996 which was arguably the most important of all, since it was the one that set the whole galaxy on fire by killing Ra.

Evan Lorne had been very passionate about reading all the SG-1 reports, he considered them better entertainment than television.

“Clearly, the answer must be ‘Magic,’” Sirius said when no one else felt like playing devil’s advocate.

“No, that can’t be the case because that’s down to SG-1 going back in time to do the rebellion themselves,” Charlie grumbled. “It might not have even been just the once, according to what Harry remembers reading about in that life.”

“It can still be, depending on how far back the timeline split,” Dumbledore took his turn challenging Charlie this time. “Since the Giza stargate was destroyed here, then it stands to reason that at least the conclusion of that conflict isn’t the one read by Evan Lorne.”

“No, no tangents,” Charlie insisted. “Why did the Goa’uld not just use orbital bombardment, before or after? Especially after. I do not like it when the only silver lining is that they still had to come as ‘close’ as low orbit to do it. Does Magic even reach that far? Do we know?”

They didn’t know. Not even Nicolas. Unlike the normals, no wizard had ever been to space. Not in their physical bodies, anyway.

“I refuse to believe there wasn’t at least one spaceship in the system back when they ruled the planet. I refuse twice over to believe more weren’t mustered after the first shots were fired. Especially over however many years the rebellion took. More likely decades, global coordination in a time without power lines or telephones or vehicles is no laughing matter. I can buy that here, because of Tesla pyramids and magic messaging, or whatever else the magicals had back then. Especially since there wasn’t segregation between them and the normals. But, somehow, it worked out over there in No Magic Land too. Within the span of a single lifetime, or time-traveling SG-1 wouldn’t have been so pivotal to the events.”

Harry cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Go on, Harry,” urged Nicolas.

“I – Lorne assumed Egeria was the one that did it. SG-1 turned her to their side, somehow, and the Tok’ra did the rest. Somehow.”

“Internal treachery goes without saying,” Charlie groused, not convinced. “But Ra caught her, so that clearly didn’t happen cleanly either.”

“Our myths are hardly clean themselves,” countered Dumbledore. “There is plenty of strife among the gods, both in heaven and the underworld, killing each other, eating one another, with or without creating or destroying stars. And there are ground-side legends as well, weapons of great might that ended the lives of men by the thousands and poisoned the earth. Then, too, the Asgard seem to have played a  pivotal role in that reality. Harry, what of the myths in that other Earth? Did you spot any significant variations?”

“No,” Harry replied. “But it wasn’t Lorne’s thing, he didn’t actually read that deep into them like other people, never mind someone like Daniel Jackson, so I can’t categorically rule anything out. He was more interested in modern conspiracies, and the gods he was fighting in the present. Reading about the mythic ones would’ve just made it feel even more disappointing, that’s how he – how I felt about it.”

Harry had reservations about automatically attributing myths to the Goa’uld, instead of the real gods. Most of the stories dated much further back than the time they were written down.

“Fantastic,” Charlie rubbed his face in frustration. “All this and we still understand jack and shit.”

Harry looked down. He knew it hadn’t been aimed at him, but the more the talk went on the more he felt like this too. He’d boasted that he’d finally get some answers, but in the end he hadn’t even managed to do that. Instead, he fell into a coma he couldn’t wake up from for five months.

Since it happened literally the same day as his stunt with the Goblet, one didn’t need to be a genius to imagine what the rest of the world thought about it. Harry had managed to dodge any updates about that, since he woke up in the middle of the night and immediately got himself spirited away to the Room of Requirement. But the more he did that, the more he dreaded Hermione’s newspaper clippings.

Charlie had calculated Harry’s time unconscious to be the equivalent of one day for every year lived as Evan Lorne. It added up to well beyond a whole human lifespan, which was not just down to Ba’al changing time (except not really because time didn’t work that way without a lot of deliberate meddling). It was still within the expectancy of a powerful wizard, but only when you excluded the overlap.

There was a lot of overlap. Evan Lorne had also lived a bunch of alternate timelines, and parallel realities and whatever else SG-1 stumbled into. Like those months spent in a time loop that only Jack O’Neill and Teal’c remembered, because of that one man playing with the ancient time loop device. For love.

Ugh.

One year equals one day of the gods, Harry thought darkly, automatically thinking of the Ascended Ancients every time that word entered his mind now. How callous would that make someone, towards the short-lived ants scurrying at their feet?

Since Oma Desala and Morgana were the rare exceptions, the answer seemed to be somewhere around ‘very.’

They earned a lot of goodwill for shielding the Milky Way from the Ori, however they did it, but that only goes so far when the home you’re defending is run like a prison.

Maybe I’m biased, Harry thought glumly. Shit, I hope I am.

“So,” Sirius said when the quiet stretched on too long. “What’s it going to be? Are we going to use any of this information or not?”

“Like how?” Charlie asked.

“Like going to Antarctica to see if the other stargate is there.”

…. They could do that now, couldn’t they? Harry knew where it was.

He knew a bunch of stargate addresses too. Including the one for a certain desert planet where they could find a cartouche with many more. They wouldn’t even need to calculate stellar drift for a bunch of them, though Charlie surely could do that. Even random dialling would work better than it did for the Americans in that other reality, since they already knew the point of origin.

Should they, though? That was the big question, wasn’t it?

“We shouldn’t,” Charlie said, despite being the one among them ‘least into waffling’ in his own words. “Not yet. Not without going through the rest of what Harry has for us, and – no, Harry, we aren’t going to pull anything more out of your head.”

Harry closed his mouth, having been about to offer that very thing. For selfish reasons, he thought guiltily.

“Trauma is one thing, and I maintain that it’s not healthy to remove memories overlong even then. We should put these ones back in as soon as possible, as it is. But the rest is, what? Several lifetimes’ worth of memories? Even accounting for the extensive overlap, it rounds up to over one hundred and fifty years compared to your fourteen. No, it’s way too much. You’ll have to do like the regular Joe and write all that stuff down.”

“Or we can meet up regularly and temporarily extract memories in shorter bits and pieces chronologically,” Sirius shrugged. He seemed to be the only grownup now that wasn’t treating Harry like he was made of glass.

“Or we can do that,” Charlie grudgingly assented, disliking any meddling with the mind on pure principle. Which, Harry was forced to admit, was fair too. Especially from him. “But not today. Today… I need to think. Cross-reference some things. Maybe concoct a model.”

“Of what?” Dumbledore asked.

“Messing with time on a galactic scale.”

Nicolas, who was nominally the leader of their little conspiracy, nodded in agreement and set about collecting the memories back in their vials, and from there back into Harry’s brain. Harry might have felt more conflicted about their return, if what had happened right after that wasn’t so much worse. Almost much worse, since the – it cut off before… any of it could happen.

Thank God.

Well, whichever of them was real. And still around and watching over him, if any. Maybe that ‘master’ the bartender mentioned, assuming he wasn’t talking out of his ass because he didn’t actually know anything either. Which… actually wasn’t that unlikely. Lorne had lived through a lot of the events, but for what happened in that diner… The only thing he could weigh that bartender’s actions against was that same man’s word.

Considering what all he did – and the Others – versus what Harry strongly suspected them of having done – namely make Ba’al’s time travel machine work to begin with, time did not work that way – he was not inclined to take him at his word at all. On anything.

Of course, the bartender had been in his head and could have decided the truth would be the best thing to use in that situation, even for a habitual liar. Work on Harry. Or against him? There was clearly no love lost…

Is this what he wanted? Harry quietly fumed. To make me think myself in circles wondering what was true or not? What was even the point? And then that thing he made me remember – relive-

No. Don’t think about it.

I’m burning dad’s old magazines when I get to my room, Harry thought waveringly. Just in case.

To Harry’s guilty relief, his friends weren’t waiting for him. Well, they were, but they were asleep in the anteroom the Room made for them while the adults worked in the pensieve room. They’d tried to stay up waiting for him, but ended up falling asleep where they sat. They’d finally crashed now that they weren’t staying up in shifts to watch over him.

Harry dreaded the next morning, when he couldn’t avoid them anymore, but at least he could hide from them a little longer.

Harry wished he could hide from everyone else too, but Nicolas wouldn’t have it because he was responsible like that.

Harry went through the motions as Nicolas took him back home – the Flamel’s home – and even managed to enjoy the meal Perenelle had prepared while they were gone. Harry refused to let the actions of that – those creeps ruin the rest of his life. After all, they hadn’t managed to make Harry live through… all that. Again. They’d failed.

Hadn’t they?

To Harry’s horror, however, when he did make his excuses and got back to his room in the Pottery, he couldn’t find the magazines.

Oh god, he thought in dread. Did he – that creep, did he manage to – oh god, he was here? They were – they’re here, in this timel-

“Looking for these?”

Harry whirled around.

Nicolas Flamel stood in the doorway, holding up James Potter’s old magazines.

Harry didn’t know if he was more relieved or mortified.

Nicolas showed very little in comparison, which was… not the best sign in itself. For such an old immortal, he tended to be pretty open with his feelings. Which still made most of his displays look subtle, he didn’t feel strongly about most things anymore because of sheer experience with everything under the sun. But it also made his moments of deliberate restraint that much more obvious, like now.

Nicolas rolled up the magazines and shoved them in one of his many magic pockets. “Come with me.”

Harry didn’t want to, he wanted to hide under his bed until everything went away.

Nicolas led him down to the den, then through the floo back to his home. There, tea and scones were waiting for them in the kitchen, along with a fountain pen and inkpot next to a stack of fifteen empty notebooks bound in hardcover.

“This way, even if your friends wake up early they won’t be able to interrupt us,” Nicolas explained as he pulled a chair for Harry to sit on, then took one for himself. The one to Harry’s left, not too close to seem overbearing, but also not across the table like some judge. “Charlie won’t be around to port them over either, if they go through Raptor Mountain again. He’s gone home to spend time with his wife. Says it always gives him inspiration when he’s otherwise lacking.”

For a while, the only movement in the room, besides Nicolas slowly stirring his tea, were the shadows of the hearth fire on the walls.

“How did you know?” Harry finally asked when the silence was too much. “When did I give it away?” He was sure he gave no hint-

“You didn’t.”

“But then-?”

“Harry,” Nicolas gently chided. “Who’s been teaching you divination?”

“Oh.” Harry’s face started burning. “Right.”

“I didn’t see anything you went through over there, or any talks we might have on the topic since that’s too much my future. But I saw you burning these magazines with incendio, not letting the spell lapse even as you began to choke. Once they were ash, you didn’t immediately freshen the air either. You stood in that smoke, coughing tearfully like some twisted penance.”

Harry hadn’t actually planned that far ahead but… it sounded like something he might have ended up doing. Right now.

“Clearly something… obscene occurred.” Nicolas took the first blank tome and pushed it across to Harry, along with the fountain pen on top. “I won’t demand a confession. But I advise you write everything down. In order, if possible. Facing trauma tends to seem much less daunting when viewed in its complete, broad context. Also, any new activity will make older experiences feel more remote, especially when accompanied by intense thought. About other things.”

My trauma wasn’t mixed in with any of the other stuff, Harry wanted to say but wasn’t brave enough. It came after the end.

He took the notebook and pen and began to write.

Since Nicolas had couched this as therapy, Harry decided to start with Evan Lorne’s early life.

He exhausted that topic before he was even a third of the way through the first notebook. He… didn’t really feel bad about it. About how unexciting it had all been. Living as your average Joe was what he’d always wanted, and now he had it. Evan Lorne had been a normal kid who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before it… went to complete crap by the 2020s. Literally. Apparently. Ugh.

His dad was a car mechanic, his mother was an art teacher, and he himself picked up the hobby of painting as a regular weekend activity. He had one older sister. She married and had two sons by the time he joined the military.

Henry Evan Lorne loved ice cream, put aside his painting when he joined the Air Force, didn’t become estranged from his family even after all the NDAs he signed upon joining Stargate Command, and was ‘blessed’ with involvement in some of the more pivotal events after that. Beginning with the Unas mission and culminating in a different galaxy, after he joined the Atlantis Expedition.

Evan Lorne also used to sleepwalk when he was a kid, which was when his life as Harry Potter… almost resurfaced. He was prone to indulging conspiracy theories a tad bit too much because of that, but that was understandable. After all, on this side all of them except the simulation were all real. Come to think of it, many of them weren’t inaccurate over there either. Little grey men, the government hid the existence of aliens, alternate realities intersected with the main one on the regular, even the Trust didn’t come out of nowhere.

Honestly, it was harder to believe that the Trust were taken out. It said something that Stargate Command needed a spaceship with borderline magical teleport capabilities to do it, and even so the world’s aspiring shadow leaders still almost stole the spaceship later.

But he was getting ahead of himself.

Harry did a Hermione and wrote ‘see volume , page(s)  to _” before moving on to a new section. That way he’d be able to fill in the reference later, after he actually wrote that stuff down.

It would take weeks to cover everything if he went at things in detailed and chronological order. Which he would. Nicolas Flamel didn’t raise no scatterbrain. But what remained of the night should be enough to summarise the highlights. It was a good thing that Evan Lorne had such abundant experience writing reports.

Broader context, Harry thought. That’s what Nicolas said right?

The first major ‘context’ was the first journey to Abydos of course. Catherine Langford recruits Daniel Jackson to crack the code of the Stargate, which he does. This allows for a successful activation of the wormhole, which Major General West orders Colonel Jonathan “Jack” O’Neill to lead a team of special forces through. And a nuclear bomb too, because the scars of the Cold War era ran deep and long. Things happened, including… some really convenient decisions on Ra’s part, culminating in a slave rebellion and the destruction of Ra and his spaceship via point-blank nuclear detonation.

The second major context was the guerilla war against the Goa’uld system lords. One year after Ra’s death, Apophis is exploring Ra’s old territory and coincidentally stumbles on Earth. He and his jaffa attack the mothballed SGC military base, and kidnap one of the female airmen to use as a host for his wife. The institution of Stargate Command and the subsequent failed rescue attempt result in the miraculous defection of Apophis’ right-hand man to Earth’s side.

With the stargate revealed to be part of an interplanetary network of countless worlds, multiple teams of airforce soldiers are established. Their role is to explore the galaxy in the hopes of securing technology and allies against the Goa’uld, whose interstellar pyramid warships and vast armies of enslaved walking incubators promise a swift end to Earth and his denizens. Just as soon as Apophis isn’t too busy fighting the total war that broke out between all the Goa’uld when Ra was killed.

The flagship team, SG-1, is composed of a Colonel Jack O’Neill with newly revealed jester tendencies, a Daniel Jackson returned to Earth in a bid to rescue his Abydonian wife from Goa’uld possession, the aforementioned defector Teal’c, and Captain Samantha Carter of… suspiciously implausible accolades now that Harry thought about it. She seemed to be that reality’s Jeannie M. Leavitt, the first female fighter pilot, but… there was no way she could have clocked all those flight hours at the same time as creating the stargate dialling computer. She also somehow managed to get multiple PhDs at the same time as flying missions in the Gulf War. Supposedly.

Harry didn’t care how smart Samantha Carter was, there weren’t enough hours in the day for half of all she did, and not enough energy in a single human for a fifth of it all. Her alternate reality version where she was just a civilian astrophysicist at least had a background that made sense.

I smell shenanigans.

Moving on, SG-1 successfully form several connections across the galaxy –Tok’ra, Tollan, Nox, Asgard – but only the first and last of those actually provide help, and the price for that help becomes progressively higher as time goes on. Tragically, the Asgard end up out-doing the Tok’ra in that regard, with the addition of the replicators to Earth’s problems.

Meanwhile, Earth itself becomes its own worst enemy by way of the NID, which repeatedly attempt to take control of the Stargate and other alien technology. Even succeed, at a number of turns.

Eventually, Apophis is handed a final defeat, only for an even bigger and badder Goa’uld to arise in Anubis. He has bigger ships than all the other Goa’uld, better technology than the Asgard, and invulnerable Kull warriors that can take out entire armies by themselves.

It turns out that Anubis is half-ascended because Oma Desala made a bad judgment of character, and the Others decided that galactic genocide and slavery at his hands was a fair price to pay to teach her a lesson. To the point where they prevented her and other ascended, like Daniel Jackson, from vanquishing him. Conversely, they did nothing to stop Anubis from using Ancient technology, claiming non-interference. Because cleaning up after yourself is somehow a bad thing, apparently.

Maybe Daniel Jackson was wrong and the Others would have intervened if Oma didn’t enter eternal combat with Anubis to stop him… but with his new personal experience, Harry would sooner expect them to break time instead of anything sane.

Omniscient morality licence is a croc of shit, Harry echoed words he’d once thought as Evan Lorne, in that alternate life where he’d lived long enough to see the internet at its best.

How Earth managed to build its own interstellar warships amidst all that, never mind while still keeping the Stargate program a secret… Evan Lorne himself called bullshit on that one, so Harry Potter definitely had no idea.

As for the Merlin and Ori thing… Harry didn’t much like where his thoughts were going about that. The universe switches from Egyptian to Arthurian bent, a new SG-1 is formed which includes a woman of impossible stunts and leeway – no way would George Hammond and the entire crew of a starship just be taken out by a random woman with a single zat, Kull armor or not. Said woman ends up becoming a twisted version of Christianity’s Saint Mary for an evil(er) version of the Ascended over in a different galaxy. Which is the original home galaxy of the Ancients, and thus humanity. Apparently.

So much ridiculous stuff happened after the Goa’uld and replicators were vanquished, but Harry was wondering more about other things. He strongly suspected either time shenanigans or mind manipulation were involved again, potentially way back in that reality’s history. Everyone including Morgana acted as if they’d just walked out of that completely made-up French nonsense about Arthurian Britain, instead of what really happened in the past. Why? What was the point?

It wasn’t a case of events being different over there than here, the authors and writings were exactly the same in both worlds.

In the end, it falls once again to SG-1 – Daniel Jackson in particular – to create the Sangraal and send a working version to the Ori galaxy. Somehow, no Ori manifests to freeze time or otherwise prevent the device from activating on the other side of the supergate, and they are all destroyed. Unfortunately, Vala’s daughter ascends right after that, and all the faith energy from the Origin religion goes to her.

SG-1 therefore has to go to the Ori galaxy and find the Arc of Truth that is suddenly a thing, a supposed ‘brainwashing’ machine which had just been lying around the place for the last billion years, or whatever the time frame was.

The Priors, whose mind-connected staves are conveniently all linked together, are ‘brainwashed’ all at once to stop worshipping the Ori, which apparently weakens Andria just enough that an eternal battle between Morgan and her becomes feasible. Thus was the day saved from ancient malice and negligence by an ancient miracle. How that worked when the priors were a handful amidst untold billions worshipping the Ori directly… that could only be down to Ascended space-time shenanigans again, no doubt.

Then Ba’Al managed to use the ridiculous ‘wormhole through solar flare’ method that should in no way result in anything but time loops, in order to go back in time and make it so the Earth never had a stargate program. Which also allowed him to build a proper time machine which enabled him to conquer the whole galaxy like Ra once did. At the end of which he finally came to Earth and got his plans to annex it fatally derailed by his frustrated queen.

Why couldn’t Qetesh have put the galaxy out of his misery sooner?

Trying to distract himself, Harry began to make a list of what gate addresses he remembered, which were few. They’d need the pensieve to get the full collection of addresses Lorne had seen. Harry found it hard to care either way.

If Lorne hadn’t finally died in that timeline, would Harry ever have remembered his past life? Would he have ever made it back from that reality? Or would he have looped… however many times the Others changed time, again and again, while his body here aged and wasted away? The only reason he wasn’t an atrophied mess was because Nicolas gave him Elixir again.

Harry was both glad and not that Lorne hadn’t had much directly to do with any of the Ori ridiculousness, having long since gone over to the Pegasus galaxy to deal with an entirely different mess of problems. Because Preston B. Whitmore’s Atlantis either wasn’t where the man thought it was, or it wasn’t the first city to bear that name. Maybe it didn’t exist at all, over there.

Don’t even get Harry started on the Wraith. Especially on top of everything else. Almost all of which were problems left behind by precursors. Neglectful. Abusive.

Brain-stealing scavenger parasites, inherited slavery under a feudal galactic tyranny, a galactic-scale genocidal tyrant that didn’t think that all was evil enough, an unstoppable tide of AI bug monsters bend on devouring all technology, an insatiable race of humanoid bug monsters bent on eating all life, the even worse faction of the same precursors hellbent on intergalactic jihad, degenerative brain damage any time you used an ancient repository because there was nowhere else to look for a solution to these inherited problems…

If this was the price of the Ancient’s legacy, Harry didn’t think it was worth it.

The Alteran leftover that came with the fewest strings attached was the weapon at Dakara, which was the only reason the human form replicators were defeated. But then it turned out there was a whole planet of those things in the Pegasus galaxy, because of course the Ancients had to be the origin of that mess as well.

I’m more biased than Lorne ever was, Harry thought darkly. But can anyone blame me? After…

Harry shook his head, looked outside to see that dawn was breaking, and turned back to read everything he’d written so far.

Even having lived through it, even being the one who wrote it down just now, even being part of a secret society of magicians that was actually in control of the world… reading the history of Stargate Command felt fantastical. Evan Lorne hadn’t thought that much about it, busy as he was running missions and what else. But there had been… a lot of miracles.

Contrived coincidences all over the place, enemy defections when even those weren’t enough, language non-barriers as convenience demanded, technologies so magical that nobody sane would have just left them behind, never mind lying around undiscovered until SG-1 needed them. Some for hundreds of millions of years, like the Arc of Truth. That thing just laid there in the dark, in a galaxy full of enemy gods or whatever the Ascended and Ori were. All of them with a vested interest in not allowing such a thing to exist, and who had full knowledge of where the Alterans had fled from. Not one of them looked through those ruins? Nobody?

Then… there were a lot of things disguised as failure that were also miracles in hindsight.

The USA decided to mothball the stargate after Ernest Littlefield proved it worked, instead of continuing to use it during the Second World War. The Pentagon subsequently lost track of the files, which delayed the first military expedition to after said war and the Cold War that followed. This, in turn, delayed the creation of Stargate Command to when Earth had actually narrowed the technological gap enough that the opposition to the Goa’uld wasn’t entirely hopeless.

Also, nobody thought to look at the footage of that same Littlefield test, to find the seventh symbol before Daniel Jackson came into the picture. General West didn’t know about it at all. Then, when they managed to successfully lock in six symbols for the Abydos planet, it occurred to nobody to just… try all the 39 symbols in order until the right one worked on position seven? They didn’t need Jackson at all…

But the abject incompetence meant that they did have him later, as translator and accidental prophet on Abydos which proved most pivotal to events.

‘Someone’ had messed with people’s minds. Or time. Or both. A lot. Nothing else was enough to explain all of that.

I – Lorne thought the same thing when he read the report, Harry remembered. But he dismissed it as false information deliberately inserted in place of whatever the real events were, for opsec. He thought he lacked clearance for the real report. He considered Ra’s description as a quasi-energy being to be obvious fabrication proving his assumption. Was it really, though?

And then Lorne never thought about it again. Like it just didn’t matter. Even though he got hung up on a lot of much less blatant censorship, that was why he was into conspiracies to begin with. Those were just few in a long string of contrivances too, it should have called to him like a bloodhound.

‘Ascended may not intervene in the lower planes,’ Harry thought disdainfully. The ‘Others’ were lying through their teeth the whole time, weren’t they?

Maybe it was unfair, maybe Harry was just being biased, but he didn’t feel inclined to give any benefit of the doubt after what that creep did to him.

Were… the Ascended the gods? Was that where the gods went, an alternate reality? They made a separate reality for themselves and abandoned the rest of them? A cluster of alternate realities and parallel timelines all revolving around the same plot? And if that was the case, then…

Where the gods evil? The real ones, not just the Goa’uld?

Not just the Ori either…

“You can take a break any time you like,” Nicolas’ voice came from… not at the table. “I won’t tell you to sleep, since that’s all your body has done for five months. But this is still supposed to be for your sake, not ours.”

Harry looked up. Nicolas stood in the door with a tray of early breakfast. Harry had become so absorbed in writing that he didn’t notice him get up and leave.

He watched the man walk over and begin spreading out the food. Thankfully, Harry somehow didn’t suffer from appetite problems, at least as long as he didn’t think about – what he almost lived through. Dreamed through.

Remembered.

Thankfully, Nicolas didn’t begin reading his notes immediately. They instead enjoyed an early, peaceful breakfast where Harry could fool himself into thinking it was just one of those early days after Nicolas took him in, when Harry was still coming to terms with how much his life hand changed.

Unfortunately, this time the change hadn’t been for the better.

“-.  .-“

After they finished eating and Nicolas settled in the den to read Harry’s notes, Harry decided he’d only dig his hole deeper if he outright avoided his friends. He gave his temporary goodbyes and returned to the Pottery, where his friends had also come very early because they still had Hogwarts to get back to, unlike him.

To Harry’s conflicted relief, they hadn’t skipped any of their schooling to stay at his bedside in that dark room. They’d only done that every moment outside of classes. At Dumbledore’s direction, McGonagall had given the three of them special dispensation to spend the night at the Pottery instead of the Gryffindor dorms.

There were exclamations of relief, tight hugs, and very hasty updates on what all had happened while he was out. He’d missed the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament, the Yule Ball, and the Second Task too. Not that he’d planned to attend any of them, he had every intention to be a no-show to reinforce that he didn’t want to be in any way involved. Also, he hated crowds. Well, maybe not hated them anymore, he was doing better about that now, but he still disliked them.

This all, at least, his friends had known all along, and had leaned hard into every time the topic came up. The result of this was that nobody had found out that Harry was in a coma all this time. Ron had made special sure of that by ‘making up’ a ‘tall tale’ about Harry going to bed in a dark room and becoming unable to wake up, so you lot better not bother him until his one true destined princess charming goes and wakes sleeping beauty. Many scoffs and jeers ensued as the twins themselves lambasted Ron for being such an embarrassment to the Weasley tall tale tradition, how did he expect to sell people on anything if he was so transparently lying?

Whether Fred and George saw through it or genuinely didn’t was still unclear.

Instead, the rest of the Magical World thought Harry was being aloof and private. Some woman called Rita Skeeter made up no end of conspiracy theories about him, but as far as Harry could see from Hermione’s newspaper clippings, she never did more than skirt the truth.

She skirted it really close, so much that Harry suspected she knew more than she was admitting, and Hermione agreed. But miss poison quill continued to show restraint for some reason. Weird, but Harry wouldn’t complain.

The first task was getting a fake egg from a nesting mother dragon. Viktor Krum won first place with a Conjunctivitis Curse, followed by Cedric Diggory with a rock to dog spell, and Fleur Delacour with a bewitched sleep (she got penalized for the dragon snorting flames over her in its sleep just as she passed by).

For the second task, they had to rescue a hostage from the bottom of the lake. Fleur failed to save her sister because grindylows ambushed her, Cedric saved his girlfriend Cho Chang, and Viktor Krum saved…. Hermione. Because she was his date for the Yule Ball.

“Hermione,” Harry said calmly. “Did you consent to… being kidnapped?”

“Actually yes,” she replied to Harry’s relief. “The headmaster called me that morning to ask me, and I wasn’t the only option. They couldn’t risk us talking about it without the Tongue-tied curse, so they didn’t let us know any earlier. Or whatever else they might have used to prevent us from communicating it in writing. Dumbledore was opposed to cursing students not bound to the contest, and the other headmasters had to make a show of agreeing that another ‘leak’ like the first task was unacceptable.”

Cedric Diggory, it turned out, was the only one who went into the Frist Task blind. If he wasn’t already so good at transfiguration, he might have been in trouble.

Harry thanked his friends for being there for him, but was guiltily glad Hermione wouldn’t get to fret over him immediately. They only had a little more time to get to their first class. Through Raptor Mountain.

He saw them to the door, but didn’t go through with them.

Usually at this point he’d practice magic or sword-swinging, but Harry didn’t much find the motivation for either. He began to walk around his home. At first aimlessly, then more deliberately when he ended up in those parts of the manor that weren’t used.

Dobby kept a clean home, but he also had to attend to Harry, Charlie and Nicolas fairly often, since Harry had offered the house-elf’s services to both men when they were doing work. So while there wasn’t much dust to speak of, that was about as far as Dobby’s housekeeping went, especially in the service corridors, or the workshop buildings adjacent to the main home. Harry even found a doxy nest in the attic.

He ended up spending all his time up to noon on finally dealing with all that leftover clean-up. He even did some renovation here and there, there was a lot you could do with a reparo, the scale of that spell was so big it bordered on silly. Especially when most of the broken parts were still nearby.

All the while, he waited for Nicolas to call in again. Wondered what the man was doing, since he must long since have finished reading Harry’s notes. Nicolas had excellent speed-reading, and he would probably be skimming everything too, trying to find his trauma. Which he wouldn’t, it all happened after Harry was dead and he hadn’t included it in the notes, same as he cut his memories off at the moment his jet blew up.

It was that afternoon, while Harry sat at the table of the master bedroom’s veranda, that Nicolas finally showed up again.

The man took a seat across from Harry, dropped the journals on the table and beheld Harry calmly. “There is nothing here that would explain why you would want to burn those magazines.”

Harry hesitated.

Then he took out his wand, brought it to his temple and drew the memory he’d been keeping back. The memory of what happened from the moment Evan Lorne died, up to his reawakening on this side.

Nicolas took it cautiously, but wordlessly rose and left to watch it. Maybe back to his own home, maybe in the basement where Harry’s own pensieve was. Harry could have tracked him through the wards, but didn’t bother.

Nicolas returned half an hour later, grim and silent. He gave Harry back the memory and sat back down in his chair with a face like stone. Harry had never before seen Nicolas Flamel so angry that he had to forcefully control himself.

The tense quiet went on for so long that Harry finally couldn’t stand it. He got up, grabbed the cloak from the hanger at the door, and descended to the ground floor. There, he put on his boots and went out the door into the outside air.

“I don’t remember that life, exactly…” he hedged as he aimlessly took the first footpath, which was the one eentually leading out into the forest. It was still hard to believe one of his past lives was King Herla himself. “But I do remember what was going on in my head in that moment.” Fear. Disgust. Horror. Outrage at the betrayal inflicted on him, and he wasn’t just talking about that one leftover body snatcher resurfacing just to possess his sister and r- and commit the incest that would spawn Medraut.

Harry remembered a fancier way of talking than Harry Potter too. Of thinking too. Instead of English, his mental voice changed whenever he touched on Herla’s memories, even brief as they were, to the old Common Brittonic of his time. Which, it seemed, Harry also knew now, and would be mutually intelligible with Breton, Cornish and Welsh. You know, if a situation ever arose where that was at all relevant, what with just Cornish hanging on to life in the present day.

Barely.

“Do you know why nobody’s been able to pin a historical identity to King Arthur?” Harry asked Nicolas as they walked. Like they once did on that first walk, except they didn’t need to pretend to be unaware of each other.

The far too patient man scoffed. “Besides everything other than ‘Arthur and Medraut fell in the strife of Camlann’ being French fiction?”

“Besides that, yes.” Harry felt like he might have smiled on any other day. The impulse didn’t make it nearly so far this time. “The reason is because ‘Arth’ is the first name ever put under the Taboo.”

The Taboo was a powerful jinx which designated a word as a key to revealing the speaker's location. Voldemort had used the Taboo during the Wizarding War, to take out his bravest and most defiant opposition, and also as a tool of terror.

The spell worked more or less like the Trace spell applied to underaged wizards and witches, but with one key difference – instead of being triggered by magic, it was triggered by a word being spoken. It also worked regardless of the age of the speaker, but Harry now knew that wasn’t really a difference. The Trace only officially faded upon recognized adulthood, in reality you had to dispel it yourself, or get someone else to do it for you. That was how the ministry had kept track of the doings of adult Muggleborns for quite a while after the institution of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery.

The deception only came to light during the Second World War. Thanks to scapegoats, neither the laws nor their enforcement changed even after that. But at least the Muggleborns tended to find out about it these days, and there were enough of them – and half-bloods – that it was not really an issue anymore.

Also, Dumbledore had added a component to Hogwarts’ wards that automatically dispelled the Trace, if it detected the spell on anyone inside the wards over the age of seventeen. The castle had thoughtfully made it a usual part of its wake-up routine to double check that too, ever since.

What the Taboo did have over the Trace spell was its offensive element – it disabled all but the most powerful and mysterious protection spells. Even the Fidelius Charm couldn’t completely counter it – while the Taboo might not break the enchantment outright, it did reveal the general area around the speaker’s location.

The Taboo thus enabled the hunting, murder and control of individuals, until they themselves limited their freedom to speak, leading to great stress, terror, and frustration even if they were lucky enough not to be found, tortured or killed by headhunters.

“Legend goes that speaking the true name of the bear would summon the bear,” Nicolas said thoughtfully as they crossed into the woods. “That is why nobody knows what the bear’s true name was, and every language in Europe uses some version of ‘the brown one’ or ‘honey eater’ instead. There is ongoing effort by linguists and etymologists to reconstruct the proto-European tongues, but I’m not up to date.”

“They’ll confirm it in fifteen years or so,” Harry revealed. “The word is ‘Arth’ and it was King Herla’s original name. Herlacyning was just a nickname the little folk gave him, because he played the harlequin better than any of them.”

“I don’t know where this is going but I mislike it already.”

“You know the tale, right?”

“King Herla of the Britons meets with the king of the little folk, an elf with a red beard and goat's hooves, who is mounted on a goat. The latter offers to attend Herla's wedding, if Herla agrees to reciprocate precisely one year later. The king agrees, and enjoys a most wealthy wedding guest, whose attendants do all the provisioning and hosting to the point where Herla’s own preparations are left untouched.”

The house-elves came by their housekeeping skills honestly, at least.

“But when Herla reciprocates one year later as promised, and attends the fairy king’s own wedding in his underground realm, the three-day wedding ends up lasting three hundred years on the outside. Except Herla only finds this out when he and his men return to the surface, and discover that his old lands had been conquered by Saxons two hundred years ago, which was a hundred years after he disappeared on his wife and kingdom. He and his men will also instantly turn to dust if they dismount before the little bloodhound gifted by the fairy king jumps out of Herla’s arms. Which it never does, thus the eternal Wild Hunt.”

“Herla’s-“ Harry stopped in his tracks.

You know what?

No.

It was only a memory, it didn’t play itself out, he woke up before everything happened. He’d had indecent dreams before, and they all cut off the same way before the going got good. Or bad, in this case. This was even less than a dream, it was a memory from a dream, which he didn’t have to live through a second time. Innocence had protected his sanity, as innocence always did and always would. And even if it hadn’t…

He was nowhere as faint of heart as all this.

Harry James Potter straightened where he stood, turned to the man next to him, clasped his hands at his back and gazed at Nicolas Flamel while idly noting that they were the same height. “I am Arth Wendollau ap Ceidio. Brother of Nudd and Chof, son of Ceidio ap Arthwys, who was the great-grandson of Coel Hen the Great, father of kings. Student to who you know as Merlin, but whose own true name was Marzhin Gouez Lailoken. He was my foster father who raised me after I was orphaned, and whom I respected and loved very much. Like you.”

For the first time ever in Harry’s memory, Nicolas Flamel couldn’t find any words.

“The real reason I agreed to that pact was because the king of the little folk promised to reveal who’d cursed my name. The hosting and gifts they provided were to appease my retainers, who to a man strongly advised against going to the Underworld for any reason.”

Which would have been the wise thing, considering that elves didn’t speak in literal terms that much back then.

“I agreed anyway. After all, someone was going around murdering my people in my name. I’d had to proscribe my own name before people started to believe it wasn’t me indulging unholy urgings. I could bear not a moment more of it.”

Neither could his people.

“Besides, I thought I got along well enough with the little folk. After all, they gave me a name even more famous than the one I was forced to ban all mention of, for the people’s own good. I didn’t know that they resented being treated with the same honors and rights as any of my subjects, they thought I was condescending to them. Considered it me trying to force their kind under human rule. Also, they resented mankind’s ascendance, even Magic’s ascendance, though I didn’t know this until much later. And even if not for all that… the little folk played into the image of little jesters, because they thought it was the greatest prank ever pulled over Manu’s kind.”

Nicolas watched Harry grimly. “So when the little fairy king allied with a card-carrying body-snatching ‘goddess’…”

“It was the punchline to the ‘prank’ on me. Kindly, naïve, stupid king Arth.” Harry’s voice didn’t sound like his own at all by the end, his vocal cords metamorphing to match those of the King of the Little Folk, who’d cackled as Herla was about to be raped by his own possessed sister. Oh, sweet Danu, what was done to you? “Also, I didn’t live up to my end of the pact by choice, or in any literal way. See, there was malicious prophecy involved, and I didn’t find out until it was too late back then either. Precisely one year after my wedding was the day of the Battle of Arfderydd. You already know all about that.”

Harry turned away and resumed his walk through the forest.

“… Arderydd,” Nicolas said as he followed in step with him. “Arthuret.”

“The name is not coincidence, no.”

“At the place where was killed Gwendoleu, the son of Ceidaw, the pillar of songs, where the First of the Three Faithful Warbands of the Island of Britain battled for a fortnight and a month after their lord was slain, and the ravens screamed over blood.”

Harry grimaced. “My life isn’t remembered but my death is, and only because of the valor of my men.”

“If your life wasn’t grand, no one would have cared about your death at all,” Nicolas rebutted. “That battle, and the subsequent assassination of Urien Rheged and the defeat of the Gododdin at Catraeth, are considered the reasons for why the alliance of the British kingdoms in the north collapsed before the Angles, Scots and Picts. A tragedy is only a tragedy because the people and events that play it out were among the Great. Or could have been.”

Harry pushed a willow branch out of his way. “Regardless, my battle lines were broken and I was mortally wounded, also through the machinations of that same elf king and the false goddess he’d made common cause with. They’d been going around murdering people who spoke my name in the neighbouring kingdoms too. That’s why I ended up at war with Eliffer and his sons to begin with. The elf then stole my mortally wounded body from the battlefield and took it to his underground kingdom.”

It wasn’t just there in the other Earth, Isis and Osiris weren’t the only ones stranded here either. Set and Hathor were a definite yes, if nothing else had changed. And now, it seemed, Morgana too. Or whichever of those things took and misused her title.

“Once in Undermountain, I was treated just enough that I could wake up in time to see my sister marry the little creature, to the vile amusement of the thing possessing her. I do remember a feast too, but I thought I was dreaming while it was happening, and I still don’t know when it started and ended, I must have been drugged. Yes, she was exactly what you think, and she did indeed do what you saw beginning to happen in that memory. The little king seemed to find much amusement in becoming the cuckold in his own fairy tale.”

“That is vile.”

They had come to the end of the forest now. Before them were the Rollright Stones in all their quiet tranquillity. Unbidden, Harry recalled that the surviving writings described the little elf king as a dwarf. Which he wasn’t, but… wasn’t too far off the mark appearance-wise, if you ignored the overall size and hoofed feet. Harry’s thoughts automatically turned to the strange, not-so-little dwarf that had been in the stone circle during the Yearly Walk. Who’d stared at Harry as he passed, with eyes that felt like fire on his back.

Was that…. person… planning to do a repeat of what happened to Arth? Finish the job the elf king started? Or was it just coincidence?

Could it be a mere coincidence?

“Do you think he meant you?” Harry asked, looking down as the echo of his past life began to fade along with all its kingly strength, leaving Harry to feel scared and adrift. “The Ancient bartender guy, who made me relive that. He couched it as a lesson, and a warning. Either to me or my ‘master.’ Did he mean you?”

“I don’t know.” Nicolas sounded offended and furious and none of it aimed at him. Or even on his own behalf. “But if the point was to sabotage your development by filling you with crippling fear of making another step down the path you’ve been walking so wonderfully, I can’t think of anything more likely to work.”

So it wasn’t just Harry jumping to conclusions about that.

Knowing didn’t make him feel any better.

“I doubt a being on the scale you experienced would consider any mere wizard a peer. But if it was aimed at me, then he was nowhere near as well-informed as he pretended. If he were, he would know that this is the worst possible thing he could have done to dissuade me. From anything. Such as researching ways to corporealize bodiless entities and do away with them.”

Harry’s head snapped up.

“I’m going to research ways to corporealize bodiless entities and do away with them,” Nicolas Flamel repeated, eyes hard and intent, and having clearly decided on this since before he even came back from the memory viewing. “Would you like to join me?”

Finally, despite everything, a tremulous smile began to form on Harry Potter’s face. “I’d like that very much.”

The Unified Theorem - Ending, Book One

Chapter 22, with which the first volume of the story ends. No, the story won't be going on hiatus.

===========================

Ending – Book One: Politics of Arcane Rationale

“-. January 16, 581 .-“

Reach out, heal, next, repeat. For days that was all I did. First at the foot of the cyclone, healing the blind, the deaf and the maimed whether I had caused it or not. Then I dragged my feet through the city in a rounding path all the way to the outer ring, to tend to those who were too weak or scared to make the trip themselves.

People were shellshocked, and judging, and my aid may well only have been accepted because those who escaped the castle painted me as a holy savior, come down from heaven to banish the wicked monsters that had secretly stolen the country from man.

I didn’t set the record straight only because I didn’t have the will to talk. I didn’t have the will for anything, not to walk, to talk, to stand, even to lift my arms. I should have been insensate and boneless, laid out in bed for a month while my spirit healed from the self-inflicted breakdown and immolation. But I couldn’t afford to, not if it meant leaving tens of thousands of people blind and deaf, never mind everyone who’d died. That I didn’t kill. Mean to kill.

Even so, while the body was willing the spirit wasn’t. Wasn’t able. Though it wasn’t the physical body that failed me, I was as blind and deaf as the rest of them. The only reason I was still able to do something was by looking through the eyes of the spirits, and even then I needed Richard’s strength just to get myself moving, never mind cast spells.

I finally drifted off mid-way through restoring the hearing of a one-legged old man, but I didn’t fall. My body just… kept moving by rote. Moving, healing, rinse and repeat. My need had written itself into the Light. And from it. Out of it… Death… was… so close… white gold all around me, searingly bright as if I was standing inside the sun. It burned.

The Light kept working its healing through my vacant shell until I had seen to everyone that I had harmed, and all those who came to me in between. Even with Richard and Uther helping me in shifts, it took days. Days and nights of doing just that with no interruptions until, at last, only one person was left. So my body finally left the city behind. Listlessly dragged my feet, down the road and off the road and through forest and trench, to where Emerentius was still fallen, unmoving and being fought over by people with far too high an opinion of their claim.

My consciousness only returned many days later, with a false smell of oncoming rain, the sound of people arguing all around me, and the feeling of a stiff back from sitting on the very cusp of rigor mortis all that time.

“-ou can’t be serious, Uther!”

I was sitting on the ground, my back against gold dragon scales.

“With all respect, Lord Duke, you are biased,” the cleric so named said flatly. “There is a reason the Church did not have cause to look into the happenings here – it wasn’t that the local clerics are corrupt, or missives were intercepted, or any other malice aforethought. At least no more than everywhere else. No, the fact of the matter is that, as bad as he was, Aiden Perenolde did uphold his role as mediator of all four estates, if only by weakening them equally as much as he could. Do not cry foul that your enemies are so emboldened, now that you have no king to defend you.”

In front of me were Richard and Uther.

“I am not talking about enemies!” Richard’s voice snapped like a whip. “What I want to know is what Lordaeron is thinking, crossing our borders right now, never mind in force of arms! You’d think House Menethil was more eager for war than Stromgarde!”

Around us, maintaining a forcefield and an anti-travel ward, were mages dressed in violet robes. Why… were they having this argument here? Amidst…

“You ask me for insights I do not have, when you should be demanding answers of these interlopers instead, unless you mean to paint me as some manner of abettor in addition to tyrant sympathizer.”

Purple. Mages. The guards of the Violet Hold. Dalaran’s prison. They were scattered in all directions, maintaining an anti-travel ward because… My memory… hadn’t been interrupted this time. They’d tried to abscond with the dragon and failed, so now they were preventing others from trying the same? No-

“What point would there be?” Richard sounded bitter now, even as the mages pretended to be aloof from the conversation, did he know they were Dalaran’s prison guards? Did anyone? “Their highest council can’t tell a real man from a lizard. If they galvanized Lordaeron to madness they’ll just blame the dragons again, all the while ignoring what it says of their own gross incompetence. If I could banish them I would have, their claims of neutrality are as hollow as the place where Alterac Keep once stood.”

Dalaran. And the dragons. They were at odds now, either over custody of me, or because either or both of them tried to take off with Emerentius and they couldn’t. Or both. Because…

“You could,” Uther’s tone was more level now, though no less clear. “You only need-“

The Light…

“No.”

Emerentius was healing himself.

“You will have to, Duke, lest General Hath remain at loose ends.”

Emerentius was healing himself, and everything in the same space including the Arcane. Which prevented any changes against the purpose of natural order. Prevented arcane spells.

“Too late for that now,” Richard said darkly. “He’s taken matters into his own hands. He is escorting the host of King Liam Trollbane of Strom. Here.”

Even for Emerentius it should be impossible, nobody knew I’d made that discovery… Unless the dragon hadn’t been as comatose as he seemed when I dragged myself down here to do this very thing. Heal the Arcane all around me so that nothing could warp it, especially arcane magic. To prevent his abduction. For barely a minute, before I finally fell against him and didn’t come up again.

Until now.

“You heard that, you lot?!” Came the voice of Mercad Occitanier from almost right next to me, Richard’s second-in-command. “Make sure your masters over in Dalaran hear about this right fast, so the Menethils know they won’t be the only kids with swords on the playground.”

Either these men were casting blame blindly for Lordaeron’s uncannily effective espionage, or Dalaran’s vaunted neutrality had collapsed in the face of a nuclear bomb as easily as everything else.

Except Geirrvif, it seemed. The valkyrie was still with me, in the spirit world.

“Emerentius,” I spoke. “Get to safety.”

With a wing buffet so strong the air flattened me, the black dragon blasted upwards and was shooting away at full Light-assisted acceleration before the mages even realized he’d left their spell’s confines. Also before any dragons could realize he’d been awake well before me, it was just a wild guess but-

With colored flashes and the sounds of organ chimes, two dragons erupted from the forest somewhere to our right in a futile attempt to pursue. One was Rheastrasza, both of them were red, and they continued flying away even after it became clear they were never going to catch up to Emerentius, who’d already disappeared into the distance.

I fell on my back and didn’t hurry to get back up. I waited until the forcefield came down.

Mercad crouched next to me, hard eyes aimed at the foreigners with sword drawn like a barrier between them and us. “Your family’s with My Lord Duke’s wife and sister.” Richard must have told him how to handle me during a crisis. I perceived the pattern of a sound trapping spell too, centered on a charm along his wrist. Discreet as well. “They’re same as you left them, but down in Hillsbrad instead of Stormsong Valley. Kul Tiras forfeited any direct stake in this by leaving early, but My Lord still decided his demesne was safer until this mess of diplomatic incidents is over with.”

My sight was all a blur, but I somehow managed to grip his pauldron well enough to haul myself back to a sitting position. I felt the Arcane around me and my mood hardened. The anti-teleportation magic was still in place. It wasn’t just my dragon that the wardens of Dalaran were keeping in place, just as I thought.

“Richard,” I grunted. “Where’s Antonidas?”

The duke stopped just short of hugging me, gave the mages around us a vicious glare, then got down to one knee to take over from Mercad in keeping me upright. “He was called to give account of events in Dalaran. He never came back.”

So either he washed his hands of us, or had been detained somehow himself. No bet on which, if it was to disavow me Antonidas would have done so in person. “What of Kairozdormu?”

“He was taken away by a couple other bronze dragons, one was even bigger than him. They didn’t speak to us, just did something so we couldn’t interfere. One moment I was listening to a report from one of my men, next thing I knew there were three of them disappearing like ghosts in the daylight.”

“Narett?”

“Up in the city. People stopped coming for healing when you – when they realized that you were actively harming yourself to keep going. I was able to run proper triage after that, let only the ones with damage no one else could solve through. Narett’s helping the clerics see to what minor injuries remain.”

Still? Over a week later? “… The rest? The ones who got out? Gilneas?”

Richard grimaced. “My very few surviving peers agreed to go home and rally their banners, though it didn’t take much persuasion since they’re convinced a civil war is imminent, once the heirs of the Sellouts take their parents’ seats.” I could almost hear the capital letters. “Antonidas teleported them, and the foreign dignitaries as well before he took his final leave. Only Mara Fordragon chose to stay, at least until the Archbishop passes this way on the way back to Lordaeron. She’s working with the other clerics too.”

Who was left? “Ravenholdt?”

“Somewhere or other,” Richard looked away with a scowl. “’Securing the new board’ he said before he pulled his vanishing act without any further explanation. No doubt it’s his way of expressing disapproval, he wanted to send his assassins after the remaining holdouts that weren’t present at the party, few as they are. I said no, obviously.”

Other than branch house members, the only heirs not present at the occasion were the scions younger than twelve. “Did he mean the heirs themselves, or their regents?”

“He didn’t say.”

I weakly waved for him to help me up, which he did reluctantly. I had to take a few moments to make sure I wouldn’t fall back down. “Was there a service for the dead?”

“It took the priests days to finish reading all the names,” Uther replied this time, in a voice just barely warmer than ice. “But the funeral itself was necessarily short, seeing as you left no bodies in the wake of whatever you did.”

He stood looming over the two of us, with only Mercad taller than him now. Outside the range of the latter’s anti-eavesdropping charm. “You have misgivings.”

“For months I stood by your side as a walking, tacit endorsement on the part of the Church, only to now learn that the entire time you had been planning regicide and mass slaughter. Yes, I have misgivings. I am only still here because I do not trust you to follow through on your promise to his Holiness to confess your sins.”

Richard glared up at the older man but didn’t say anything. Clearly, this was not the first time this topic erupted between them two.

I didn’t say anything either. After all, what Uther said was all true. By the time the Archbishop visited me, I had already committed to causing the deaths most of the Alterac aristocracy, even if this wasn’t how I thought it would go. I’d expected for most of the cancer to kill itself through in-fighting, just in time for Richard to sweep into the city and take care of the rest however he saw fit. Public trials, knowing him. That dragons got involved didn’t change that, it only changed the number of people I personally killed by the end. Added some two and a half dozen children to the list of dead too.

I felt a pang of heart-deep ache, and a feeling as if I was being showered in swashing, sizzling oil, but that was from the spirit-sacrificing spells more than my decisions. My actions only left me with a dull, fatalistic feeling.

The black dragons could not be allowed to escape. They would have roused Deathwing the Destroyer, the Corrupted Aspect of Earth whose opening action in another future would be a cataclysm that shattered the entire world in omnicidal fire and earthquakes. Granted, his actions during the First War were admittedly more restrained, if you could even use that term for enslaving the entire red dragonflight to serve as attack beasts and mounts for the orcs. But now, here, I’d categorically proven that his fall to evil and madness had been a tragic failure, not unavoidable fate.

If he woke up and found out about Emerentius, Alterac would burn in volcanic flame, and the ensuing global cooling from the ash blocking the sun would finish what was left. At minimum.

“My Lord?” Richard called when I stood there too long. “Can you walk?”

The mages around us were discreetly moving as if to ‘accompany’ us into the city, up until Mercad turned on them with a vicious glare and the threat of calling his soldiers down on them right there if they overstepped themselves on foreign soil one more time.

I patted Richard on the shoulder and pulled myself free from his grip. “I’ll do better when I’ve eaten something other than magic eater fish.”

My joke didn’t fall flat, but only because it didn’t fall at all. The moment I wasn’t in physical contact with anyone, the world turned slow, and grey, then completely colorless to an uncanny degree that my mind would have struggled to process if not for the memory of being dead for so long, where sight didn’t use light at all. I saw now the same way, and through the Light and the Arcane too, as… everything stopped. 

In front of me, through a vortex shining the color of golden sand, came a person. He had extremely long brown air, gleaming blue eyes, and the tallest and most muscular body I’d ever seen on a high elf, dressed in bronze armor over grey-blue robes.

“I am told we do not require introduction,” said the Leader of the Bronze Dragonflight, the Aspect of Time. “But I am also told that you value polite comportment. I am called Nozdormu, and I am precisely who you have already deduced. Greetings. I am pleased to finally make acquaintance in person.”

I stared. For longer than it ever took me to return a greeting. “Hello.” I was almost at a loss for words. “Are you here to eliminate me?” I was at my weakest by far, if any time was good-

“I bring information, clarification, confirmation, and a question of my own that will determine how you and I proceed.”

The Light was with me, as bright and mighty as ever, but suddenly it couldn’t fill the deep pit in my gut. “What inf-“ something occurred to me, as suddenly as it was belated. “Where… when are you talking with me from?”

“Here and now, I am here in full. But if you wanted to know when and whence leads the portal behind me, the answer is the Caverns of Time, precisely ten years from now.”

Ten years. Year 592. Year 1 of the New Calendar. The year when the Dark Portal was to open, if nothing changed, letting the orcish horde spill into the world. If everything I already did isn’t enough of a change. “Do I get a say in whatever script you have for this conversation?”

“You already have, you are on the other side of the portal right now.”

It felt like all my tension wanted to rip its way out of me like a chest-burster. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m there by choice, or conscious.” Or alive, even. “I’d have to take you at your word.” I was in no shape to soulgaze anyone right not, even if he let me.

“I was assured that would not be the case.”

From the portal came a glowing star, which shot right into me with no impulse from me to avoid because I felt to threat, and no woe. It was… me. A piece of spirit. My spirit. It entered me and dispersed through me, filling the open wounds in my flesh and not flesh, soothing all my weakness and my pain.

There was the promise of accomplishment there, blended with an echo of sorrow, the feeling of power far greater than what I’d managed up to now, and no memory of future deeds save one: myself breaking part of myself off and throwing it through the portal just now. “Ah…” I almost collapsed all over again from the sudden relief. “That’s… some proof.”

“I agree.” Nozdormu hadn’t known what form the proof would take either, it seemed, and the Light did not warn me of lies in his words. Not the Shadow either, I could…

The Light wasn’t fainter, but it was thinner because my spirit was thinner after all I’d done. I could perceive what moved in the Void better than before. Nothing of what I’d seen in Fahrad was present here. “So, what? You’re just here to… provide exposition?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“And the fact that this will once again make me seem more omniscient than I actually am is just pure coincidence?”

“What you do with your knowledge is, as always, your decision, but no. It does not run contrary to the needs of time to service your mystique.”

How did he say that with a straight face? “Alright. What-” asking about information was my first instinct, especially since nothing came to mind of what I could require clarification on… but that just meant I’d missed something important, didn’t it? “Let’s start with this then: what clarification?”

“Kairozdormu was only wrong about the when, not if,” Nozdormu said. “It is possible to reset the world the way he told you. It just hasn’t happened now.” Nozdormu gave me a meaningful look. “Yet.”

… Holy- “Are you… asking for my permission? Or my help?”

“I have the latter, it is the former that I am not sure about.”

The former- permission? He wants my permission? Since when do the Bronze dragons need anyone’s permission for anything?

No, no distractions. Don’t interrupt someone doing you a favor unasked. “Reset the world.” Just how many blind spots did those strangely prophetic games back on Terra have? “Is it really possible?”

I knew the games went all-in on the alternate timeline multiverse nonsense, but if that was really possible… then there was literally no reason why the Bronze had to aid and abet bad events. Unless you’re literally evil, you’re only restricted to bad choices when the power is contested, and it certainly wasn’t the Infinites actively forcing history to turn Alexstrasza into a sex slave for the orcs-

“It has already been done,” Nozdormu derailed my inner tangent. “More than once.”

What? Making Alextrasza – no, wait, we weren’t talking about that, we were actually talking… about…

My mouth fell open.

Reset.

Rest the world. “Holy shit.” What? “When? How?” Was Kairozdormu right and that was involved in me showing up here? But I saw no such thing, nor was there anything – no external force acted on me, nothing drew me or pulled me or-

“The War of the Ancients was not a mere one-off mortal conflict,” explained the Aspect of Time. “It was a grind that unfolded over a span of time many times longer than the history you know. Sometimes it lasted decades. Sometimes years. Sometimes days. Always we lost. And always, the five Dragonflights would come together before the Keepers in the Halls of Origination at the heart of Uldum, to pour our combined might into the Dragon Soul and join it to the power of the world itself tapped by those places.”

I stood in astonishment at the things I was hearing.

“It was a mighty stalemate. A galactic-wide stream of demonic invaders matched against effectively infinite reserves, on a battlefield that always, actively favored us in all ways. All the while, we never lost tactical and strategic parity. Though none besides me and a few others recalled past times, our heroes were always returned, and Ysera’s dreams and portents did well enough to make up for their lost memories and backsliding experience. Even without this, there is a limit to any skill. Sargeras and his lieutenants could hardly draw any further benefit from experience, after a while. Mastering a skill doesn’t take more than a few years, in the end. That is why mortals can contend with immortals at all.”

I didn’t say anything.

“When Sargeras turned from tactical warfare to bedroom diplomacy, it wasn’t because the Well of Eternity was the greatest weakness on our front, it was the only weakness left. Even then, it could only be breached from this side, not his. That was why he lowered himself to seducing a mortal queen.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“Contrary to your worries, demons do not respawn in the Twisting Nether, never mind instantly. Most of them were mortal first, after all. Only very few life forms native to that dimension can reconstitute that way, like the Nathrezim, and even they do not recover the power they gained after their original birth, or even their bodies – it takes much to grow from an imp to a demon lord. But we developed ways to prevent even that by the fiftieth iteration of the War of the Ancients. If any such creatures survive from those times, I will be surprised.”

I still didn’t say anything. It was hard enough just to take all of that in.

“Unfortunately, betrayal ultimately did come, and from no vector we had suspected. Though time was rewound for all life on Azeroth, the Re-Temporization for the earth itself was barely better than crust deep. The corruption of the Old Gods continued seeping out of their prisons, compounding all the while and accelerating Neltharion’s corruption faster and faster every cycle. Even so, when the Aspect of the Earth said to create the Dragon Soul early and use it on offense, his reasoning was sound – if we were to reverse the process and turn the power of the Titan Facilities through it outward, Sargeras himself could have been slain.”

“… How many times? How many times did this happen?”

“Six hundred and sixty-six.”

I’m not even shocked anymore. “Is this why the Pantheon gave Azeorth so many things? The Halls, the Forges, Titans by the dozen, even a bunch of them with the potential to become their heirs…”

“They never shared their designs to that extent, at least with us dragons, but I believe so.”

Odyn never even hinted at any of this, in any of our conversations. “Did the Keepers remember?”

“Freya certainly, for a time in the beginning, she was intrinsically connected to all life she personally nurtured, before the toll became too maddening and she severed it,” said Nozdormu. “Odyn perhaps, to whatever extent his other eye saw events from the other side, though he keeps to himself on most things relative to us dragons. Helya I do not know, though I would not be surprised if the recurring deaths of so many contributed to her fall to madness. Some days, I myself am surprised I haven’t done the same, then I wonder if I did and I just don’t realize it.” Nozdormu’s stoic manner slipped momentarily, to something softer as he beheld me. “Somewhat less, now.”

Nozdormu fell quiet.

I stood there, ruminating over everything I’d learned.

It took some time, and I still had questions, though the one that yelled loudest in my head was one that that conflicted me the most. “Do you… mean to undo the Sundering?”

All the land on Azeroth was a single continent, before they had to blow up the Well of Eternity along with Sargeras. That was how the War of the Ancients finally ended for good.

“If only. Alas, Re-Temporization has far narrower limits to its potential span. A few decades is all that we could manage then. Even if the breaking of the world hadn’t ripped or displaced a majority of the ley lines the Titan facilities relied on, the World Soul itself can hardly spare so much power now.”

“… Assuming it goes along with it, right?” I ventured a guess, which wasn’t immediately denied. The Titan facilities weren’t just prisons for the old mollusks, they were also designed as means to nurture the titan of Azeroth and shape it. Its form. Its consciousness.

Automatically assuming the worst without a previously observed pattern was for cowards, so I didn’t think it was a case of trying to indoctrinate or brainwash a baby. Besides, it’s not like planets would have the same life cycle as humans. That said, if the Sundering wasn’t enough of a wake-up call for the World Soul, what would be? “Is the Titan awake?”

“Not that anyone has noticed.”

I stand corrected. “Alright, then… why tell me all this?”

“Because, in theory, if we were to initiate the process again, it should be possible to reach far enough to include the last few months of your life as of this moment.”

My head felt light. The last few months.

Altarac Castle, everyone who’d just died, all the meetings that went wrong, everything I’d had to decide while still blind to the future because of a betrayed spirit pact, my little brothers…

I ran a shaky hand over my face. “Might that be really Sargeras beneath your face, offering me the devil’s deal?”

“It is not.”

My laughter sounded hollow in my ears. I’d never felt so feeble. “No, Nozdormu. Let the World Soul be.”

“… Not even a moment’s consideration?”

“I don’t know how far you can travel and affect time without the powers bound in the Dragon Soul,” I said, feeling wrung out. “But by your own words, to offer this at all you must either have it, or a sane Aspect of the Earth, or both. Both mean that, just ten years in the future, Deathwing is no more.”

Nozdormu didn’t deny it.

“Did the Cataclysm happen?”

“No.
“Then why are you here at all? You said future me is right there with you. Why not ask him?”

Did I go bad, or-?

“Because age does not necessarily bring wisdom if trauma is plentiful enough, even after it heals.”

I felt a wave of dread, and even then it was overshadowed by all-new outrage. “Are you… being deliberately obtuse right now, or just circumspect?”

“The latter.”

So I was expected to take him at his word where it counted, of course he’d lie in the same breath as he all but stated someone I loved was going to die. Or more.

No.

No.

I felt a bitter pang of resentment. Who did this creature think he was, to test me? Never mind like this? How dare he? “Get out of my sight.”

“Pardon?”

“When I asked Kairozdormu why he did all he did, his answer was that you told him he had to convince me to convince you.’” I glared at the dragon’s face, so perfect and so fake. “If not for the meddling of one of yours, none of this would have happened. You sent him here. And now, even though you knowingly and deliberately caused all my problems, you have the gall to come here and offer to make them go away like it’s some kind of divine grace! As if – as if it’s my character test?!”

Nozdormu’s expression closed off. “It seems I misjudged the situation.”

“No,” I said bitterly. “You judged it perfectly. The moment I’m at my weakest, my most depressed, never has my judgment been more malleable than right now, right here, you could not possibly have chosen a better time to bring me low, whether with violence or false hopes. Congratulations, you’ve succeeded.”

Nozdormu sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “This was not my intention.”

I clenched my fists. I’m supposed to be allied with this person in the future? How?

The dragon sighed. “My current self has Kairozdormu. He will recover.”

Light forbid he leave without getting the last word.

“He is on your side now, as it happens, though my current self will not know that for certain for some time. I will talk to myself so that he does not err the way I just did.”

Please don’t.

“More relevant to your present, your deployment of Khaz'Goroth’s Breach was seen from all over the northern continent. Strom’s response was predictable, but the reason House Menethil is coming in force is because of Dalaran. They saw you replicate the feat that ended the Troll Wars and reacted rashly. They cannot currently abide the thought of anyone being in possession of that secret besides them. The greedy want it, the neutral want the knowledge you possess, the good don’t trust anyone but themselves with the power you displayed, and the Council of Five, currently, will not take no for an answer.”

Of course they won’t, their prison guards were all around me right now.

“They were swift in denouncing the ‘unspeakable crime against mankind’ that was perpetrated here. In absence of the archbishop’s moderating influence, King Terenas was swayed by their argument, and the urging of Prince Thoras Trollbane who currently enjoys his hospitality.”

All the justice in the world couldn’t stand up to a single snub.

“Krasus is no longer available as a moderating influence in the Council, and the red are now conflicted at best towards you, with him gone. The one you saw flying away with Rheastrasza, without a word to you or even showing his face, despite watching you for days on end, was Tyranastrasz. It was a snub, and it was deliberate. The Green are unavailable as you know.”

I was being baited, but I didn’t care anymore. “What about the Blue?”

“Their situation rests on a future development which your future self insists is best left free of prophecy’s taint.”

“Well, if it’s me saying it, I suppose I have to agree.”

“I disagree.”

“… Does current you feel that way?”

“More so,” Nozdormu said cautiously. “I – he – is so wary of Infinite trickery that he suspects even himself. He believes these spots of hope are merely building up to something worse. The developments that will categorically prove I am no longer destined to become Murozond will take some several years yet.”

A tense quiet fell between us then. I thought he would say something about the Archbishop, it was the only thing he’d left out at this point. But he didn’t, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t care why. All I wanted was for him to go away.

“The answer to the question you told Kairozdormu to ask me is yes.”

… Excuse him?

“And my addendum is this: there is no limit on time frame, at either end. You are free to see to your aims when and how you wish, no matter the world.”

The Dark Portal. It could be used to reach times before and after. From any time before and after. I didn’t know if I wanted to thank or throttle him. “It didn’t occur to you to open with that?”

“It did,” Nozdormu admitted. “Clearly, I made the wrong decision.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response, my mood was beyond salvaging now.

“Do you wish me to tell you who will perish among those you hold close? And how?” The dragon had the nerve to outright ask.

Somehow, I don’t know how, I held myself from punching him in the face. “Did you discuss this with future me?”

“Yes. He said not to tell you.”

“How does that even work? Unless you don’t expect to be able to change the past anymore?”

“I have deliberately avoided observing this conversation, from all points in my time. There is no path it cannot take.”

Nozdormu, Leader of the Bronze Dragonflight, the Aspect of Time, had just told me that he’d made all the wrong decisions the moment he chose not to use his powers. And he didn’t even realize it. Much how the current him didn’t have all his powers. And would continue to not have them for ten more years.

Good god.

Maybe I’m overreacting, I thought despairingly. Just like I told him, I’m in the worst emotional place I’ve ever been. Nozdormu probably came here in good faith and it’s me that’s screwing it all up.

I didn’t know what it said about my life that I actually wanted that to be true. I pressed my hands against my eyes and tried to think logically. Try to – there had to be some wisdom about this in my memory somewhere.

You can form objective opinions based on the measurable elements of a situation, I recalled the recording of a wise man’s words, long long ago. Or a subjective opinion based on how you feel about it. But those are two completely different conversations.

Unfortunately, Nozdormu gave me neither the time nor peace and quiet to figure out which kind of situation this was. “Perhaps it would have been best after all, if I did not come.”

“Look, just… do what future me says to do.”

“… As you wish,” Nozdormu finally backed away. “May the mystery be one less burden to bear.”

One less – there’s literally no world where unsolved mysteries make things easier!

“The Archbishop will arrive in Alterac in but few more days,” the dragon said in closing, because of course he couldn’t suffer any event to be completely free of his meddling, I had to be wrong about this too. “But I see you would rather hear about that from the man himself.”

Nozdormu finally departed.

The portal closed behind him with the feel of a time loop firmly locked in place.

“Well, Lad?” Uther asked when time resumed its flow. “Can you walk, or do you need us to carry you? I have my horse over there, if you need it.”

I blinked and met the eyes of this person who loathed what I had done, even more so because of all my secrecy, my deception of the best people around me in service of conspiracy to mass slaughter. But he was still offering to make my burdens lighter. Unlike every last lizard. “You’re a good man.”

Uther turned visibly uncomfortable. “If only you’d matched action to those words before now.” He turned away to get his horse before I could come up with a reply to that rebuke of my character. Or, well, what I did relative to his character. And didn’t do. Didn’t let him in on my plans. Because I wanted his hands to remain clean, like I did Richard.

“He has no business judging you,” Richard rumbled nearby. “He is not from here, doesn’t know what it’s like to live under such an evil king, he’ll never understand.”

“He understands, he just doesn’t accept because compromise with objective evil is objective defeat. Now he won’t have to do that,” I said ruefully. “His standards for good can stay intact. Stay the right ones, mighty and high as everyone’s should be.”

I’d managed to live up to those words with Fahrad.

Not now.

Richard’s lips twisted in a sneer, but there was more introspection than resentment in his eyes now.

I was introspective too, but about something completely different. Namely, the one root cause behind all that had happened this year that reached even deeper into the foundation of this frustrating world. Now, with the dust finally settled, I had arrived to a conclusion.

The Old Gods were not quite as insidious as they thought themselves. They’d never come up with a story where a weasel and a swine manipulate a child into eating bugs and singing ‘everything is fine’ as he abandons his heritage for a life of aimless vagrancy, for example. They’d certainly never think of making an entire generation of people, young and old alike, hail it as a masterpiece of culture.

Of course, if they did ever think about it they’d probably succeed, which was why getting a hold of a proper human mind made them so dangerous.

Unfortunately, my troubles didn’t end where their influence did. Aiden Perenolde hadn’t been some misled youth or mind-bound thrall, he was an evil swine whose minions happened to include an ancient black dragon masquerading as a professional murderer. That made him my problem, which eventually ended up making a bunch more dragons into my problem, and the mollusks puppetting the whole lot of them.

People back in my last life used to quote ‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ It completely escaped them that the inheriting was only going to happened after the Earth had been nuked into a flat wasteland. Which itself was well after the Rapture took all the worthy believers away to God’s side. Supposedly. It wasn’t a promise of heaven, but of hell.

It also escaped them that the original saying referred to being as meek as a warhorse, which meant that you were expected to bravely charge in battle when called on by a worthy lord.

How fortunate that I had a worthy lord right next to me.

“Richard.”

“I am here.”

“Men, dragons, those are just two of three evils that meddled in this mess.”

“They are? What is the third?”

“The monsters in our strangest nightmares.”

Anyone else would have thought I was being deliberately vague, but not Richard. He’d been there for my talks with Antonidas, and even without them…

He asked no questions that would give the mages around us anything more to work with. He was a discerning sort, my Paladin. “What will you do?” he asked.

“Everything you won’t be able to do while tied up with ruling the country from here out.” I ignored the flash of alarm from the man who’d been certain and hopeful that I would become King myself.

Back when I’d first remembered in this life, I’d made plans. Plans I’d set aside after getting tied up with events here in Alterac, because a pair of bronze dragons didn’t think I was being brazen enough.

Now, those plans had just moved back to the foreground.

“I’m going to retaliate.”

Bylaws of Babel - Chapter 3

This one went on way too long, but somehow I ma

Query on Potentially Hopeless Endeavour Avoidance

Much more time ago than I thought it would ultimately take to finish the story, I put up a poll for what story to do after Understanding Does Not Presage Peace was completed. I put up some polls, one here, one elsewhere on the net where I get the best reader engagement. Long story short, the final result was that I would pick up Sons of Suns and Sands, my Star Wars story where Luke resets the galaxy to Republic days and Obi Wan gets to pick up his life all over again just as he turns 13. I was very proud of it when I first wrote it.

Already at the time of polling, though, the Star Wars franchise had been effectively murdered by Kennedy's Lucasfilm, and everything that came out since then has just been the raping of its corpse. I won't lie and pretend it hasn't soured me on the whole thing, but the bigger fact is that the reigning sentiments towards Star Wars all over the world seem to have gone from contempt to utter apathy. You only need to look at the ' performance of stuff like the Acolyte and Outlaws for that. More tellingly, the only Star Wars show that was good - Andor - did poorly in terms of viewership too.

It's practically inevitable that a bunch of you here are over Star Wars too, now, even if you weren't before.

Additionally, I've since learned that I'm not very good at predicting which of my stories will actually be truly popular. Understanding itself was a surprise, while I expected the other story that won the polls - Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time - to draw a lot more engagement than it has since I resumed updating it. I still consider it my best story to date, but the numbers are clear. I am absolutely sure Sons of Suns and Sands won't garner even half as much, at this point.

Conversely, Bylaws of Babel (my new Warhammer Fantasy/40K fusion) has already exceeded all of my other stories in popularity. In fact, it almost matches Understanding in the eyes of you lot here, and far exceeds it everywhere else in terms of engagement.

I've managed to update four stories each month for the last three months, but it's not looking to be sustainable, unfortunately. So, as much as it might be a dick move towards those who voted previously, I'm putting up a poll between the Star Wars and Warhammer stories to see which one is actually the biggest draw with my existing audience. I hope to be able to continue doing four a month, but it's far from a guarantee. The initial burst of enthusiasm will come to an end sooner or later.

Take your time deciding. I'm going to take a 'break' and not pick up Understanding's successor this month, to get a bit of rest (which is really just a return to the prior update rate) and re-read the story if it proves necessary.

Ignore my whining and vote for the one you want most.

Understanding Does Not Presage Peace - Epilogue

This is it everyone, the final installment of this story. I hope it ties up the last loose ends well enough.

To those of you who enjoyed it, I'm glad. To those who feel the tale is unpolished or missing pieces in places, I apologize and hope what is here at least passed muster with you. To those who didn't like it but are here nonetheless, my sincerest appreciation for your forbearance.

Finally, a sincere thank you to all of you who stayed this long. I want you all to know I appreciate all the support you've given me. If not for all of you, this story would never have been finished.

===============================

Epilogue: Those Who Face the Earth

“-. April 1, 9 ANB .-“

Credit to the Ame border guards, they kicked things up the chain really fast once they realized I really was who I claimed I was. I didn’t even have to wait an hour before a certain self-proclaimed God of Rain was descending down from the sky.

Since I still had a few moments before he was low enough to imperiously talk down to me without having to yell, I of course flew up to meet him. Which led to me looking slightly down at the orange-haired corpse puppet because I was one of the tallest men on Earth. “Hello, kinsman, I’m glad to finally meet you,” I briefly glanced past him precisely in the direction where I could feel his true body waiting with Konan standing guard. “Even if not strictly in person.”

The Deva Path stared at me for a lot longer than I thought Nagato would. “I wondered when you would come to treat with me.”

“I’ve not come to treat with you, I’ve come to heal the mess that Danzo, the other Hanzo, and Madara’s eyes made of your body.”

“Excuse me?”

I stuck my hands in my pockets, which coincidentally made my white coat flutter magnificently in the convenient gust of wind. “I do have some opportunities to discuss, but there’s no point before I’ve given proof of reliability, right?”

“Do not play games with me,” Pain demanded. “What did you mean by Madara’s eyes?”

“The Uchiha Madara you know wasn’t really Madara, he was Uchiha Obito, the Fourth Hokage’s student. He’s dead now. The real Madara did survive long enough to press him into his service, though, and those eyes you have are his. They were implanted in you because your Uzumaki Yang bloodline trait gave you the greatest chance of awakening the ability to bring people back from the dead.”

“… Rinne Tensei,” Pain understood immediately. “I was meant to resurrect that man.”

“Obviously, that’s not going to work anymore since I destroyed the King of Hell.” The real Nagato’s chakra thrashed violently for a moment, over yonder. “It was the last and worst vestige of the Shinju that the demon Kaguya and her siblings planted on this world in order to devour us all. The other realms were harmed and perverted even more than this one. I will not apologise.”

“For one facing a god, you are incredibly brazen.” Pain tried to punctuate that claim with a sudden press of gravity. It only made my coat flutter, instead of forcing me back to the ground. “But I suppose you have more cause than most for your lack of fear.”

Yeah, that kind of nonsense didn’t work on me anymore. “I have a question I’d like to ask, and it’s not intended as an insult.”

“Speak.”

“Did you ever try to resurrect Yahiko?”

Pain was silent for quite a bit longer than a moment this time. He stared at me through Yahiko’s necrotized eyes. “Yes.”

“I thought so. Do I have your permission to heal your real body?”

“So certain are you, that you can achieve this miracle without even a cursory examination?”

“Yes.”

Pain delayed in answering for long enough that I could have guessed he was discussing the issue with Konan in the background.

“I will agree on one condition,” Pain finally said.

“That being?” I asked even though I’d watched the entire talk between them just now as if I was right there.

“You must reach Amegakure before me.”

“What does that have to do with my credentials as a healer?”

“It does not,” Pain admitted. “However, it has everything to do with your credentials for everything else I wish to verify.”

“No, you’ve already decided to let me help, you’re just playing mind games because you’re annoyed at me ruining your ambitions of world policing, and to see how much I personally care about this even after all that. And you.”

Pain didn’t gape at my audacity, but I was sure it was all down to the degree of emotional separation from remotely puppetting a corpse.

Some clarification remained though. “Does this mean I have permission to enter your country?”

“… You do.”

“Great, let’s go down and tell the good border guards so they don’t signal a country-wide alert or anything.” I didn’t wait for him to agree and flew down. I wasn’t sure he’d actually go along with it, what with the optics of God coming down to earth to treat with mortals, but he did.

“I’m holding a clan gathering next spring,” I told Pain as I was signing my visitor’s visa in front of the gobsmacked border nin. “Talking, barbecue, kids playing in the sun, all that good stuff.”

Pain’s blink lasted longer than the others because he needed to take a moment over in his hollow tree. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, little cousin, you’re invited. Obviously.” I slipped the pass into my coat pocket, not caring that our audience was staring at both of us, stunned. “Unless you decide to commit genocide or try to hold the world hostage for some impossible ideal of peace, or something silly like that. On that note, I have to invite Roushi too, so I’ll stop by his place first.” I smirked. “See you in Amegakure.”

Teleporting to Roushi’s hermitage was the matter of half a moment, I’d long since looked ahead to see where I could come out of my dimensional slide. “Kinsman!”

Roushi fell off his meditation post right on his head. “Sonnuva bitch!”

“You’re doing well! I’m glad.”

“Ack,” the middle-aged man rubbed at his head as he glared at me. “What the fuck? Where did you come from? Who the hell are you?”

Not the most serene sort of ascetic monk then. “Hattori Hanzo, Head of the Clan.”

Roushi’s impending diatribe died in his throat. The entire world knew who I was these days, it was kind of annoying.

Oh well. “Anyway, as I just told your head of state, I’ll be holding a clan gathering in about a year.” I transmuted a fancy invitation out of the air and dropped it in his hands as he climbed to his feet. I then gave his hand a firm handshake, during which I initiated ninshu with the beast sealed in him. Son Goku, I’m almost done with the solution for you and your siblings, wait just a little bit longer. “It was nice meeting you. Oh, and since I’m here.” I used some of what Minato had taught me via ninshu in the past few months to make a modification to his seal.

Roushi staggered away from me with a curse, trying and failing to initiate tailed beast mode. Not because he couldn’t, it was very easy now, but Son Goku was too emotional to cooperate. Unless I was mistaken, the Four-Tailed Gant Ape was gearing up to give Roushi a major tongue-lashing. Which he could still prevent from occurring, I wasn’t going around spreading Gaara-type trauma. But if he wanted the chakra, he’d have to convince the beast from now on.

“I’ll be going now, your fearless leader has decided that a race somehow matters to my reliability as a healer for some reason. I hope you can attend.”

The next moment, I was in the sky above Amegakure.

Since Pain wasn’t currently here, because he’d taken all his paths with him to the border in case he had to fight little old me – I’d known where they were all along – it wasn’t raining. It wouldn’t be a problem even if it were, I’d be able to redirect the droplets so he didn’t detect me through them, even incidentally by moving the air around them, but it seemed there was no need.

I very openly descended from the air down to the city, and upon showing my visitor’s pass to the very spooked shinobi who surrounded me, I asked to be given the scenic route around town.

The fact they complied told me I either had reputation here so fearsome that it rivalled Pain’s literally godlike one – unlikely – or there was some standing policy about how to deal with me if I did show up out of the blue one day. The latter I confirmed by means of Trito invisibly eavesdropping or overlapping the paperwork of the security stations we passed by on the walk.

Soon, Pain caught up with us and dismissed the ninja to lead me into his palace of copper and iron.

“I attempted what you asked many a time,” Pain told me, and I knew he was talking about the corpse he was speaking through this very moment. “It did not work, even with the Naraka path. There was nothing to revive.”

“That’s because Yahiko’s not in Hell.” I ignored the way Nagato’s chakra coiled with tension. “Or most other places. He’s in Heaven, despite that the chakra system abuses the Yin so much during life that most ninja can’t even remain themselves after death. Most of you lot break down until there’s barely enough to reincarnate as an animal. In that regard, Yahiko was lucky to die so young.”

To my surprise, Pain didn’t say anything to that, though I could feel his real body in turmoil some distance away, deeper in this strange palace that gave the impression it was constructed more than half out of pipes. The Deva Path walked ahead of me, so I couldn’t see his face, but we were headed in that direction.

“Before you ask, yes, I talked to Yahiko while I was up there.” I could feel the question just barely withheld. “Quite understandably, no one wants to come down from Heaven. But he’s willing to make an exception at least a few hours, for you and Konan. Since you have his body so well preserved, I can use the sympathetic principle to find him and let him use it for a while. You can decide what to do from there as a group.”

“Heaven.” Contrary to most things I’d expected, Nagato’s chuckle actually came through even this dead puppet. “Of course. Where else could he be? Of course the King of Hell could not return him, Yahiko never passed through his mouth at all, did he?”

We were both silent up until the Deva path opened the door to Nagato’s inner sanctum, which was more of a sick room than a parlor. Konan was camouflaged in my supposed blind spot, so I gave her a nod in passing on the way in.

“Is Yahiko also Uzumaki?” was the first thing the real Nagato asked me upon finally being in the same room. “I read your book on genealogies.”

“Let me see.” I took one of the corpse’s hairs and rubbed it between my fingertips while I analysed the DNA. “No, he’s part of the clan they experimented on and accidentally turned into pseudo-sages that either turn to stone or go berserk after turning into misshapen monsters. I’ve fixed their problems too, though Yahiko never had anything to worry about. He wasn’t part of the experiments per se, he was son to a couple in the control group.”

Nagato was silent for a while. “Even our clan stopped at nothing in pursuit of power, did they?”

I scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. They stopped at plenty, it’s not like they kidnapped people to play god with. It was a retainer clan, and the Uzumaki did not renege on their side of the deal. They promised independence, land, and startup money, and they gave all of it. Nobody expected the monster transformations, and why should they? It was just the Shinju ruining everything for everyone again. The rest of the blame falls with the other nations for massacring Hidden Whirlpool before they could come up with a treatment. Fortunately, that’s no longer a problem either.”

“You make many grand claims,” Nagato remarked. “Can you prove them?”

“Do I have permission to heal you?”

Nagato looked at me, then past me to Konan who was still poised to strike me down, even though we all knew she’d fail. Whatever passed between them, though, was good. He looked back at me and shrugged as if to indicate the contraption he was trapped in. “If you need me to lie down, we will have to relocate.”

“No, this is fine. Wood Release: Artificial Womb Technique.”

In the end, Konan still thought I was attacking and tried to smother me under twenty layers of crepe paper.

It didn’t work, but it was still kind of funny.

“-. Konoha, same time… .-“

“This is not funny.”

“It is not meant to be.”

The longer I lived, the more I understood why roosters started every day screaming. “Sarutobi,” the me over in Konoha told the sprightly little man who was now the third most powerful man alive. And forty years younger. “My hiring poster was for the position of secretary, not spy. I already have Shisui for that.”

“Oy!” The bodyguard in question complained from where he was substituting for the post I was supposed to be interviewing for. “I can hold loyalties that are higher than the one to Konoha you know.”

“So can I,” the Third Hokage told me.

“Coming from one of only two people in the world who might credibly try to subdue or kill me, that’s not very convincing.” They couldn’t, I was growing and training my powers more and more every day, and I was in three places at once now, not just two.

But it was the principle of the thing.

“Is it so impossible to believe?” The former hokage asked with a humble tilt of his head. “After all that has happened, is it so impossible that I would want to put Konoha behind me?”

“You can do that just fine without becoming my problem,” I said flatly. “Go retire to the country or something, don’t pretend to need anyone else for that.”

“I only have this new lease on life because of you,” Sarutobi replied, which was true. “Should I not be allowed to spend it in payment for that miracle?”

“And I should also want that, because…?”

“I am a master calligrapher, know several types of shorthand, am fluent in the dialects of all the notable nations as well as sign language, and I consider paperwork a way to meditate stress away, which will enable me to work even the longest and toughest hours without issue. Furthermore, my combat ability has only grown since your healing, and I am willing to dedicate all of it to the defence and preservation of any goals you set. Indeed, I do not believe there are worthier ones anywhere on Earth now.”

Flattery was the bane of all organised resistance, I swear.

“I also have abundant connections all over the world, both coercive and diplomatic, more so than even Minato himself. Conversely, I am much more respected than feared, which will only serve to open more doors for you. If you accept my application, I will leverage all these things to your greatest benefit within whatever parameters you set. In fact, though it may harm my case here, I will place all my contact at your disposal in any event.”

Annoyingly, this was by far the best pitch I’d heard these entire two months while I was looking for a personal assistant. In two different countries.

“I also possess the Shadow Clone technique,” Hiruzen reminded me. “With the mental acuity and massive chakra capacity I now have thanks to you, I can easily use about a dozen of them constantly. You are unlikely to find another applicant capable of the same.”

“If it was just clones, I could do that myself.”

To his even more annoying credit, Hiruzen only nodded respectfully instead of asking me why I was looking for an assistant at all, if I could do that. Which would’ve been fair, but only for an underling already in my service for long enough that both of us were willing to let it slide.

Coming from the former absolute ruler of the place I’d lived all my life in, it would’ve set a much different tone. “Hiruzen, let me be very clear about this – I chafed enough under your rule when I was a normal man. If you’re only here to try and put new strings on me, you can fuck right off.”

“I am not.” Hiruzen folded his hands over one another in his lap. “Is it truly so impossible to fathom? That I’m here in good faith?”

“Yes.”

“I see it is not easy to convince you. What will it take, then? Give me any test. I will pass it and thenceforth loyally serve as your kashin.”

Apparently, my terms and conditions of employment were so much better than the hellscape of the wage slave workplace I was actively avoiding, that people here couldn't fathom I was looking for anything less than life-long, sworn-in-blood retainers.

“Kashin,” I tasted the word. That went far beyond what the job demanded. “Are you sure you want to overcommit this much?”

“Is it overcommitting? Or is it the minimum you will accept from the likes of me?”

“Shinobi with their first loyalty to the Village and Hokage, you mean? And the Daimyo too.” I rested my cheek on my fist. “It’s true. I do not recognize any authority above my own anymore. Knowing that, can you truly serve me and me alone, Hiruzen Sarutobi?”

I held the eyes of the former Hokage, daring him to make an issue of what my words implied about the little Uchiha putting double duty over there.

“… Yes,” Hiruzen finally said, and I knew it was the truth. “I can.”

I… still didn’t believe him.

“Hanzo… No.” Hiruzen abruptly straightened where he knelt, then bowed his head like… a real and genuine inferior. “Most Honorable Lord. Every time in the past, this unworthy one never stopped subjecting you to unseemly mind games and power plays. Always I abused my advantage against you, even as I failed to do the same with those I truly should have. You suffered at my hands, and much more at the hands of those empowered by my indulgence. But when the tables were reversed you granted me mercy, and salvation from weakness, agony and madness. I know I do not deserve to impose on you after all this. I am a poor excuse of a man. But here I am nonetheless. Please, allow me to repay you for all that you have done.”

Don’t weep for the stupid, you’ll be crying all day.

No, that was too unkind.

And…

As someone claiming before all the high and mighty that I planned to completely defang the Cycle of Hatred, it would be hypocritical if I couldn’t grant this little forgiveness.

“The Forbidden Scroll.”

“Pardon?”

“The Forbidden Scroll of Sealing. The most confidential Hokage records. The Root records. Your own clan’s most sensitive secrets too, while we’re at it, and of course your personal ones. Make it a handwritten confession. The arms and armors of all the past hokages too, why not. Bring them to me. Without anyone knowing. Even Minato.” I smiled grimly as I stood up. “I probably still won’t believe you, but I’ll be out of arguments at that point. You have until tomorrow at noon.”

I wish I could say it was an impossible task, but today was also the day when Minato and Naruto were scheduled to finally get those seals taken out. This way they, at least, they won’t be around to make Hiruzen’s trial impossible. No way was he slipping such ridiculous theft past Minato, even with the Tree of Life on his side. Curse my soft heart!

Hopefully I was right that he wouldn’t go that far, especially to give me every possible leverage over his own clan and himself. Then I could put this weird episode in my life behind me.

I should’ve just hired Kaiza, I thought mournfully as I teleported to the Hokage tower. But he persuaded me my business would take off even faster if he remained an independent contractor.

Which it had. He’d been right. With him getting the population on my side, and Gato fed to the sharks before he could cause any real trouble, Wave Country was going to be my very own neutral economic superpower in no time. Almost every other household there had their own gun already, and Tazuna was even plotting my first train rail.

There was the issue of reincarnation as well. Many of the Uzumaki had reincarnated in Wave and other places along the coasts, according to the people in Heaven who’d been there for some of them. It would help a lot if the country liked me, should I ever go about collecting those people in the future. If only so I could restore one of the more respected figures to pass leadership to, and finally stop feeling like a walking line theft.

It still rankled not to have such competent help all to myself though. Worse, because I’d chosen the noble approach instead of just taking over the country and getting them to love me afterwards – which I easily could have – I now had to give Hiruzen an equally fair shake just to stay consistent.

And here I thought the worst was already behind me, after I had blindsided the Fire Daimyo with my independent powerbase in a different country as a fait accompli.

This can’t be what people mean about having all your dreams come true, surely?

“-. A few hours later… .-“

Nagato was healed, Nagato was emotional, Konan was twice as emotional, and the one to blame for all that was Yahiko who was now properly undead. Also, he’d needed all of ten minutes to persuade the other two to follow me to Hell.

“What is this place?” Konan asked when we had passed through my portal, the first words she’d ever spoken to me. “Is this truly Naraka?”

“It was a barren place made of many block-like posts with seemingly bottomless pits between them, like basalt pillars but square.” I waved at the vibrant blue and red vegetation all around us, massive megaflora growing fast enough to see with the naked eye. All of it shone and glittered with its own light. I pointed beyond it then. “See over there? It was all like that before. I’m livening the place up a bit.”

“And then some,” Yahiko was looking all over the place. “It’s nothing like I imagined, even with your descriptions. Why do they glow? Just for light?”

“Energy bleed-off.” I plucked one of the leaves of the palette-swapped ash-tree lookalike. It turned to actual ash once broken from the stem. “There’s no natural light here, so I had to come up with other ways to generate energy. These are basically a self-replicating invasive species whose only purpose is to make fertile soil out of all this stone and the like. Don’t let the huge size above ground fool you, the roots go way deeper. Still, it takes a lot of – let’s call it transmutation. It’s very energy-intensive as you might imagine. Neither the power generation nor the transmutation is 100% efficient, as indeed nothing is. Light was the safest way to cast the extra off, alongside heat.”

Heat was especially good because Hell was damn cold. It wasn’t just photosynthesis that needed sunlight.

“How energy intensive?” Nagato asked intently, because he’d never stopped looking for ways to gauge the level of danger I posed.

“Atomic.”

Yes.

I had, indeed, made nuclear trees.

“That is not a term I’ve heard before,” Nagato admitted. “One of the many things you haven’t published?”

“And probably won’t,” Yahiko wryly answered in my place. “For a long time.”

Not as long as any of them think.

“Why go through all this trouble?” Konan wondered. “If this place is for the damned…” She stopped and looked between Nagato and me. Her next words were a soft murmur, and she couldn’t look Nagato in the eye. “Though I suppose mercy for the damned is not such a bad thing.”

“Because now that the Shinju’s gone, the damned and their cast-offs won’t be devoured by that wretched tree anymore, which means that sooner or later this place will be populated by demons. Best to pretty this place up a bit before then, and make it capable of sustaining its denizens, very important. We wouldn’t want whatever hordes collect here to invade the living world like a ravenous plague of locusts in a few thousand years, or something silly like that.”

“You…” Nagato was… lost for words?

Why?

“What my friend means to not let you in on,” Yahiko said blithely. “Is that he didn’t realize your schemes are so much beyond his own in scope, and the fact your vision extends thousands of years into the future is every bit as godly as he tried to paint himself.”

“Oh, I see. Well, there’s the rub.” I looked at Nagato. “Are you willing to accept that peers exist?”

To my lack of surprise, I didn’t get an immediate answer, and Konan looked at me like I’d just kicked her cat.

“You speak of peers,” Nagato finally spoke up, pinning me with his Rinnegan and all the force of will and chakra of him in the prime of his health. “But what about superiors?”

“There’ll definitely be many of those soon enough.” I deliberately misinterpreted the question.. “The solution to maximising world peace and stability isn’t a monopoly on violence, it’s empowering as many people as possible to do sufficient violence on their own behalf. Decentralization of force, self-sufficiency, the right and ability to kill thieves and brigands without needing to pay ninja to do it for you. Still, giving every peasant power like mine all at once would be foolhardy, so I’m going to start with the monasteries. I’ll earn their trust by letting them see into the afterlife, give them all the proof they’ll ever need to know they’re right about most things. After that-“

“That was not what I asked and you know it.”

With a roll of the eyes, I manifested the Rinne-Sharingan in both of mine and glared right into his.

He blinked first.

I shook my head and walked ahead of the three of them. Dominance displays, ugh. I didn’t question their usefulness, exactly, but I did mind when the other party understood only the least impressive things I could pull out.

“Don’t mind him, Hanzo-san, this is amazing!” To my continued lack of surprise, the only undead in the group proved the most amiable. And in possession of all the common sense the Akatsuki had between all three of them. Or however many they were right now. Leaving the other two to walk behind us, Yahiko sidled up to me again. “How did you do it?”

Trying to butter me up, was he?

But Yahiko came by it honestly, so why not? “That’s the beauty of DNA,” I waved grandly at my slice of hell. “It’s nature's own data storage system. Cheap, very compact, can even do parallel computing, and it’s just about the most resilient organic substance known to nature. If you dropped dead right now and left your skeleton here for the next hundred thousand years, people would still be able to read your DNA, given the tools. And of course, we can’t forget its storage capacity, a single gram can store a zettabyte! That’s a billion terabytes, where a single terabyte is a thousand billion times the capacity you need to encode one letter. For comparison, a human brain can range from ten terabytes to ten petabytes. Well, if you don’t count holonomic wave-forms and quantum tubule storage.”

And I’d already lost my audience again. It was almost enough to make me wish Tsunade was here. She not only understood this stuff, she’d gone and outright figured out DNA mapping while I was still in a coma. Finally.

Oh well.

“I did some adjustments though,” I admitted. “By going from binary to hexadecimal, I was able to synthesize a new DNA base. This further increased the amount of information stored in each individual cell of these things. When the roots loosen and fertilise the ground enough, a final generation of flora will be emerge whose only purpose will be to produce seeds for every plant I could get a sample of, and a bunch more than I could come up with. By then I should have lakes and rivers up and running, if not a sea or three. It might take a few decades, but it’ll be fun to watch the ecosystem settle.”

“Just so long as you don’t make Hell better than the other five realms,” Yahiko mused. “That would be unfortunate for the rest of us.”

“Us who?”

The Bridge-to-Peace-In-Denial nodded brightly. “I’m sure I can convince Nagato to offer equivalent payment if you bring me properly back to life. Say the Two-Tailed girl?”

The ‘God’ just kept walking behind us as if he wasn’t being usurped right before his own eyes.

Good, that was the only reason I was doing this. “My only hangup is that I don’t want to go around ripping people out of Heaven against their will,” nor was it as easy as I made it sound, if they were unwilling. “If you want to come back, I’m willing to do it just because of the influence you’ll be on certain people with god complexes.”

“You may be willing to do it without price paid, but I’m not.”

Behind us, Nagato shook his head and smiled wryly. For all the offense he may or may not take at my bluntness, he seemed practically incapable of holding anything against Yahiko at all.

“You should get a free shot at Roushi too, I think. He should know what his options are,” Yahiko added. “Yugito Nii and him for Nagato and Me. Not quite a fair trade, but at least its two for two that way.”

Two for four, more like. Unless he’d already intuited some of what I was planning on the bijuu front. Maybe someone up in Heaven had tattled on me?

Kenzo, Yui, was that you two?

I felt embarrassment and more embarrassment come from the other side.

We’ll talk about this later.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we finally arrived at our destination soon after. Or, rather, within sight of it.

Minato. And Naruto. Waiting for me to arrive so they could finally do their thing in front of our oh so important audience. The me from Konoha was with them, since I was the only one who could travel between realms even now. Still, I teleported that me away the moment I saw me, because I had other pans on the fire too.

“You asked about superiors, Nagato,” I said, signalling at the distant two to go ahead. “So let me ask: what about yours?”

Right before our eyes, Namikaze Minato and Naruto bumped fists and undid both their seals at once.

Since my return, Minato and I had experimented much with ninshu. Specifically, we used ninshu to let him speedrun centuries of fuuinjutsu research by making full use of my brainpower. As a side benefit, I got to learn all of it too. I didn’t have Minato’s talent or passion for the art, but thanks to perfect memory I could more than get by. My participation wasn’t necessary for this, though.

The many additions and modifications that Minato had added to both their seals coursed over their skins, up their arms all the way to their fists, where they joined together into a conduit. A conduit that linked both seal dimensions together. And the inside of that sub-dimensional space with the one outside.

Like twin eruptions of molten glass, the two halves of the Nine-tailed Demon Fox burst out of the man and his son. Like spiralling shimmering rivers, they came together like the tajitu in the air above them. From there, it took no time at all for Kurama to take shape, full and whole.

I watched the tailed beast as he breathed the first breath of his new life. I was ready to jump in if he decided to attack while they were weak.

He didn’t.

Instead, Kurama looked down at them, then over at me, before turning away and leaving.

Damn. I was hoping to negotiate pseudo-summoning seals so those two still got to call on the chakra, at least. Guess I’ll leave that for later.

I left a wooden clone with the Akatsuki trio and teleported to where Minato and Naruto were going through rather nasty weakness and pain throes. Artificial womb technique times two, infuse bodies with newborn anami souls, heal, remove chakra systems, create Trees of Life, implant, check results, fix redundancies, effect final refinements, change Naruto’s cell souls to Hashirama structures because no way was I giving him ultimate power before he was eighteen and married, and we’re done.

Even handling both of them at once, they weren’t anywhere near the trouble that Hiruzen gave me.

While I gave the father and the son another few minutes in the trees, I returned to the trio and stopped before the orange-haired undead corpse that was the sanest man in hell.

Other than me of course. “Nagato and you for those two, right? I accept your offer. Also, while the human realm has the better atmosphere, there’s a certain thematic pathos to going to and back from Hell as your own self. So.” Trito flowed out of me and around me, rising and weaving into the Thousand-Armed Enlightened Buddha Statue of the Spirit Sage. “Would you like to do it here or out there?”

“Huh,” Yahiko huffed, nonplussed. “Before I answer I have one question.”

“What?”

“Is there anything that can kill you now?”

“A simp at sufficient velocity.” Enough momentum could destroy anything. Well, except maybe an object in a completely locked energy state, but that was my business. “An uneducated swine at sufficient velocity too, but he’ll never be good enough.”

Yahiko covered his mouth to muffle his snickering. “I don’t know what else I expected.”

“In the interest of not violating every last principle of informed consent, I only healed Nagato but I’m going to do more with you. Rinnegan or not, I trust your judgment more than his, so you’ll have live with being the strongest in your trio from now on. If any of you have a problem with that, now is the time to say it.”

I waited.

No one spoke.

Thumbing my cufflink, I unsealed the biomass I would need for the upcoming procedure. Both the chunk of super frog meat, and the other thing.

“… Hanzo-san, is that a live cow?”

“No, it’s a freshly euthanised one.”

“… Why?”

“The gut flora mostly. Transmutation is good practice, but not when it’s a matter of life and death.”

“You just had to make it all weird, didn’t you? Whatever, let’s do it. Right here, right now. I’ve been waiting to hug these two knuckleheads for way too long.”

“-. One day later… -“

Back in Konoha, it was now two years since Sarutobi Hiruzen had first revealed himself to be a pathological busybody, and my vengeance had since manifested as dreams where he featured as my browbeaten, woebegone secretary.

Now, all those dreams were about to come true.

Joy.

I sighed. “Your first job is to take all this stuff back.”

Hiruzen sagged where he stood at attention. In gratitude and relief and complete vindication. He never thought I’d actually go through this stuff either, or at least he’d fervently hoped…

But he’d still done it. And would be have followed through on his oath even if I had.

He collected the items, all of them were the originals too, and left to return them.

He left his own signed confessions behind though. It was a sizable roll of scrolls.

I didn’t touch them.

When he came back, he gave them a complicated look, but still didn’t take them back.

I sighed, picked up the roll and sealed it in my left cufflink with the rest of the sentimental clutter.

After that, for a while I just sat behind my desk and stared at the man, wondering what to do with him.

…

Well, he asked for it.

“Your second job is to be the one and only one to reintroduce Tsunade to Dan and Nawaki, and Minato and Naruto to Kushina. They’re in the basement.”

“Excuse me?”

“Unfortunately, all the Uchiha have already reincarnated. Here’s the paper with our headquarters’ address, meet me there when you’re done.”

“Masanari, wait – Hanzo, HANZO!”

“-. A few moments later… -“

After a long flight up and away, Yemo had finally made it to the moon. Which meant I was finally able to teleport over too. I could’ve done it without help, or at the very least without anyone having to make the physical journey. It would’ve taken some mental and spiritual gymnastics to match astronomical calculations with dimensional sliding, but I could’ve done it. Still, he’d volunteered.

Now that I was here, I could’ve done and said many things, from pithy quotes of a different Earth’s moon landing, to jokes at my dragon’s expense for getting distracted playing hoops and loops in the void for days.

I did none of that, because of what I felt under the surface. Or, rather, what I didn’t.

A relative while of magical earth displacement later, I stood before the Gedo Mazo and completely failed to stop myself from laughing like mad.

There were no people!

I’d drilled all the way to the Moon’s centre and I hadn’t found it hollow at all. The Last…

It was not canon! It was not fucking canon!

How wonderful!

Overflowing with happiness and relief, and a glee like I’d never felt at any time in either life, I burned the last remains of Kaguya to ash, and disrupted the atomic bonds of what was left until only helium and hydrogen atoms were left. I made sure to scatter those out in the emptiness of space as well, as far away as I could teleport them.

Then I changed the others me’s down on Earth into actual clones for the next while, and let myself completely loose for the first time since returning from death.

Trito spread out of me, further and further as my chakra poured out of me, then further still as I extended new growth from the Tree of Life, until my awareness overlapped the inner core of the Moon in all directions for a hundred kilometres.

Then I transmuted the whole thing into the moonbase I’d spent far, far too long pretending was just a mental exercise ever since the notion of a hollow moon became an actual plausibility.

I could’ve kept track of the time it took, but I didn’t.

When I was finished, I sat down in my all-new throne with a satisfied sigh. It was the first time since I came back that I felt tired.

Phew.

I looked around at the expansive hall I was in, and through the walls outside at the biome that I’d brought into being. Solid construction, architecture in line with all the best principles of sacred geometry, verdant vegetation everywhere I looked, left, right, up, down, even the rivers flowed without a problem both above and below. I’ll go over the gravity arrays more thoroughly later, but for now it seemed everything was to specifications. Even the fake sun at the centre emitted all the right light wavelengths and frequencies.

I retuned my attention to my new throne room. There was a spirit in front of me. My first ever petitioner.

I looked down at him sternly. “Make it good.”

“Papa,” the ghost of my dead son sniffed soulfully, clung tightly to my sleeve. “I wanna live!”

“You don’t say,” I said sceptically. “Whatever happened to ‘no one wants to come back from heaven’?”

“Dad,” Kenzo said seriously. “You have a moonbase.”

“Fair enough.” Transmute new body, install Tree of Life, bind spirit, infuse body with Hashirama cells and we’re done. “There you go.”

“Thanks, Dad, you’re the best! I’ll just – hey wait, no! What about the little plasma thingies?”

“Not until you’re older.”

“Awww…”

Yeah, no. Forget Naruto, no way was I giving any children ultimate power before they were at least sixteen, especially without any health condition to speak of. Even the ones I’d adopted down on the planet didn’t get to keep the Anami spirits for long, I’d long since changed what I gave them to Hashirama-type structures too.

“But Daaad-”

“None of that now,” my wife’s ghost scolded him from the throne next to mine. “Since when did I have such an ungrateful son?”

“Sorry mom.”

“How about you, dear wife?” I reached out to twine my fingers with hers. They were intangible, but not to me. “Do you want to pick up where we left off?”

“Of course, husband. After all, it’s not coming down from Heaven anymore, is it?”

“Not like there’s anyone making up rules.”

Apparently, I am the greatest dad and husband ever.

“Well keep me out of it!” My daughter Yui sniffed imperiously from the other side. “I’m going to stay and rule right where I am. You know, like a real goddess.”

“Alright honey,” I said sadly. “Stay and rule your very own Neverland. I hope you can at least visit from time to time.”

“Naturally you will – wait, what do you mean? Why do I have to visit?”

“Because we won’t,” I said flatly. “Obviously. We have too much to live for now. I understand if you don’t feel the same way-”

“Hey wait, no! We can talk about this.”

Kids weren’t all the same, but they were close.

I let my daughter talk herself in circles while I stared out through the moon’s many layers, and then further down at the blue planet. Reaching out through the many dimensions, I reconnected with the others parts of myself far down below, where I was being accosted by friends, enemies, clients, employees, nobles, peasants, and a score of children with a loudmouth on top who was blubbering in his mother’s bosom almost as much as he was trailing snot over my suit.

I brought my wife’s all-new hand to my lips so I could hide my smirk as I absentmindedly resurrected my fake-sullen daughter.

Compromise is for scrubs.

Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time - Chapter 11

How much of the prior story was foreshadowing for this, do you think?

For answers to all questions, watch Stargate Continuum.

======================

Chapter 11: Dreaming the Bad Death

“-. Henry Evan Lorne, Major, US Air Force .-“

July 2 of the year 2008 unfolded like a dream. Drills, physical training, range time – P90 record was holding steady but the MP5A3 was playing a bit hard – then it was equipment maintenance until the techs finally decided to release his bird so he could get some hours in the air. That was the dream part, flying happened a lot more rarely than any recruiter was going to tell you.

Henry was a fighter pilot, so you’d think he’d get priority time in the sky. Ha! He was lucky if he got to fly once a week anymore, or a mission a month. If they’d told him that you get less time in the air the better you got… well, he’d still have signed up for the Air Force, but at least he’d have been more mentally prepared. And maybe not ‘displayed just the qualities we’re looking for’ every time he sniffed a promotion.

See, as crazy as it sounded, the Air Force didn’t want pilots, it wanted leaders. Or at least spreadsheet veterans. So you got to live the dream as a fresh-faced lieutenant, but once you got promoted to Captain, never mind higher like him, it was frowned upon to fly. Despite how it was literally necessary to remain an effective fighter pilot.

Instead, the brass wanted you in the office, running programs, ‘leading’ people through spreadsheets, and doing paperwork the rest of the time. Paperwork that magically multiplied in those increasingly rare days where you did get air time.

Henry envied the heavy pilots, they averaged more hours per month than the fighter guys no matter how much they rose in rank. He still had more flights then them on paper, but that didn’t mean much. While a heavy pilot might get to fly for 12 hours in one day, a fighter pilot had to spend almost all of that on just take-offs and landings.

Higher-ups sold it as the equivalent of ten different flights, but in reality it was more like getting the worst blue balls in history after getting edged ten times in a row. Henry was sure he wasn’t the only one who thought the brass did it on purpose. They probably resented going through the same in their time, and now were actively spreading the misery.

The paperwork stack in Lorne’s office would be massive by the time he got back too, enough he could light a bonfire with it.

He was about to put his neglected M9 pistol through a few paces for completion’s sake, when an airman came running into the range and, upon seeing him, hurried over and leaned in to whisper urgently.

“Sir! Colonel O’Neill wants you in the briefing room right now.”

“Did he say why?”

“No sir, just to do it pronto.”

“Alright, airman, dismissed.”

“Sir.”

Henry took minute to stash his weapons in his bag to properly maintain later, and went to see what the fuss was about at the fastest clip that still passed as a march.

“Harry,” O’Neill called as soon as he was through the door. “Glad you could finally join us!”

Speaking of spreading misery… The Colonel’s name was actually Jonathan but he somehow got stuck with ‘Jack,’ so now he was doing it to Henry too. Supposedly that meant he liked you, but the mountain of paperwork back in the office raised some doubts. “Well, you know how it goes, sir, the longer you let a girl wait the hotter she runs, and we’re all out of ice cream…” Henry’s gun joke fell about as far as his mouth did when he saw the news report being projected on the wall.

“…this stunning footage just in from our affiliate station…” the Colonel tapped the remote. “-what seems to be an alien craft-“ Tap. “We're hearing reports of confirmed sightings from all across Europe and Asia as well-”

What the hell?

The Colonel shut down the TV feed, then turned a dial on the projector which switched the input from cable to VCR. Suddenly, the wall was taken up by a close-up shot of a craft descending through the atmosphere. Despite having one of the least aerodynamic shapes Lorne had ever seen.

It was vaguely pyramidal, but it looked more like a squash than anything else, and those two ‘wings’ on the side would have a hell of a time just altering the thing’s trajectory, never mind make it fly. A tap of a button by the Colonel switched to a picture from a different angle, which showed four engine nacelles on the rear of the craft. On its rear, instead of the underside. How did this thing fly?

A third image gave a partial down-up view of the thing, or a similar thing. And empty space beyond.

The photos had been shot from satellite. While the thing was descending past said satellite.

That thing came from space.

“These pictures were taken about three hours ago,” the Colonel revealed. “And the footage you just saw went on air less than ten minutes ago. That’s how little time passed between then and at least a dozen sightings all over the world.”

Lorne looked around for the punchline, thinking that someone had finally figured him out for a conspiracy nut.

Nothing.

Since he knew better than to pretend he didn’t know he was being considered as the Colonel’s eventual replacement, Henry didn’t pretend not to notice the pointed glances that were aimed his way. “What are we looking at, sir?”

“The vengeance of my obstinacy,” the Colonel muttered in that ‘distracted’ manner of his that everyone knew to pretend they hadn’t heard, though it felt like more than just fishing for subversives this time. “That, boys, is the reason I both do and do not regret turning down the McMurdo appointment. This is not a prank, or a drill, or a hallucination – yes, I had the medic check me and the air in here for drugs just before calling you all in. We’re looking at honest-to-god alien aircraft.” The man turned to look at them seriously. “Guess whose job it is to run ‘em down?”

The briefing was the most clearly-remembered blur of Lorne’s whole life, and the whole USA was on DEFCON 3 by the end of it. Suddenly the base couldn’t get all hands in the air fast enough, but at the same time they couldn’t fit everyone into the suddenly opened battlespace because this went beyond all of their wargames. The battlespace was cramped, you couldn’t fit all the personnel in at once, never mind all their equipment.

But veterans were in top demand all of a sudden, so Henry was barely out of the briefing before he was taking off in his F-15 Eagle.

It took his squadron both too much and too little time to intercept the first bogie, and he wasn’t sure what to think when he locked on its tail.

The craft didn’t attack, which he supposed was good since their orders boiled down to ‘chase but don’t engage unless it becomes hostile first.” But it also made him work to keep up with it, which wasn’t so good. It was clearly a transport more than fighter, a fighter jet shouldn’t have trouble keeping up with the equivalent of a tanker.

Did those things in space have faster craft? Did they have their own jets? How much faster than this would they be? How manueverable? Because if they had the same gravity-defying bullshit and could do u-turns on a dime, Earth was fucked.

The craft led him on a chase through Washington state, and then Washington City itself right over the White House.

Henry stayed on the bogey’s ass, but when the adrenaline drained after the first half hour, he began feeling like he was having an out of the body experience. He wondered if maybe thinking all those internet conspiracy theories were true didn’t make him crazy after all. Nobody in the force knew he was into that stuff, he wasn’t stupid. His family didn’t know either, even though his dad was the one who got him into it in the first place.

He didn’t think it would be the alien ones that turned out to be real, he was sure if any of it turned out true it would have to be the simulation. It wasn’t entirely logical, technically aliens were the ones that broke the current view of things the least. If one of those things landed and spat out a Roswell grey, he wouldn’t even be surprised.

But he’d had weird dreams his whole life, and deja vu didn’t even begin to describe the sort of stuff he sometimes saw coming in advance. He also used to sleepwalk as a kid, and there would be weird drawings when he woke up the next day. And every other week, he’d wake up in the morning with a soul-deep feeling that nothing was real, or at least not as real as it should be. Even now, chasing a real-life alien UFO, his gut feeling told him this was nowhere near the core of the onion.

His gut feeling hadn’t been wrong about anything before.

… It wasn’t telling him not to disbelieve aliens though.

It also wasn’t telling him not to freak out over the worst scenarios either, now that he was dreaming them back up.

Fuck.

He chased the bogey up until it thumbed its nose at him and flew up and away into the higher atmosphere, where their jets had no hope of following. That was when he got orders to return to base, instead of topping off from the tankers floating around to maintain air coverage.

He didn’t get to check his bird over after landing, having to hurry back to briefing the moment he was out.

“…alleged alien craft pursued by an Air Force F-15 illustrates just how close they came to both the White House and several treasured national monuments before climbing out of range of the pursuing fighter,” the TV in the rec room said as he marched by the door. “We're hearing reports of confirmed sightings from all across Europe and Asia as well. According to White House sources, there has been no communication from these vessels, but neither have they taken overtly hostile action.”

Yet.

“The President has called for calm, but we are told our armed forces are on high alert.”

And then some.

Somehow, he doubted that’ll make a difference.

It was defeatist talk, they’d only matched speed so far, not weapons, but that gut of his…

The officers spent a while doing their best to speculate on the capabilities of the newcomers, based on what the tentatively-dubbed ‘dropships’ had done. There wasn’t much to go on, but even that hinted at nothing good. It was even worse when one of the more egghead types said that use of atomics was a minimum to be able to traverse space, never mind through whatever means had allowed those things to appear out of nowhere.

A televised speech by President Hayes came and went.

“Sir, what about the Russians or the Brits? Hell, even the Chinese!” Lorne asked what everyone else was wondering. “Do we have word from them? Are they hearing anything?”

“There's been no response of any kind from the alien craft, no,” the Colonel replied. “The White House has tried every frequency there is, and so are we, but nada.”

“Why all this?” Asked Jordan. “Why would they come all the way from wherever the hell it is they came from, fly around with a bunch of F-15s on their asses for half a day, and then just split?”

Nothing good, Lorne thought, and he knew he wasn’t the only one.

That was when Master Sergeant Siler came in and went to the colonel with a satellite phone. The one linked to the confidential tight-beam satellite the base only had for when they expected heavy cybernetic interference. Which Lorne only knew about because he was still being considered for the intelligence track, and as backup in-the-know in case war broke out with factions capable of that sort of warfare. Like the other great powers.

Colonel O’Neill ordered them all to silence, took the phone, listened to it for a while, and said “Understood sir” before shutting it off and handing it back. He waited until Siler left before facing them again. “We’re about to make a complete break from military doctrine, for what the President and the Joint Chiefs all tell me are very good reasons. Reasons which we have been ordered to assist with all hands. Also, I am making it an order that any questions alongside ‘is the MIB real’ are hereby prohibited.”

Those ‘reasons’ turned out to be a one-legged guy called Daniel Jackson with a chip on his shoulder the size of mount Everest, an ace combat pilot nobody had ever heard of by the name of Cameron Mitchell (not the actor, a Colonel come out of nowhere), and Samantha Carter, the famous astronaut who’d made a huge splash a year or so back by dying on a space mission. Except she was also a fighter pilot now, and getting her own jet?

All of them looked at Henry like they knew him, which brought some of the worst déjà vu of his life to date. But they were on double time, so he ignored all the strangeness in favor of the much bigger strangeness of a dossier. Somehow, it had intelligence on the capabilities of the ‘redacted’ and their ‘bombers’ (the name for the ships they’d dogged the whole day) and ‘gliders’ (the jet-equivalents that Lorne had been worried they had, which they did).

The files made for very uncomfortable reading, because those capabilities outstripped the best the USA had.

He was re-reading the combat specs a third time when an airman came with orders from the Colonel to come back to the briefing room again pronto. As he jogged off the airfield, he saw an airman headed Mitchell’s plane.

Soon, he was back with the rest of the senior officers on the base, to receive the worst news to date – NASA had just recorded hundreds of ships suddenly appearing in high orbit over the planet. Lorne looked at the pictures. These ones were outright pyramids, except wrapped up in baby walkers.

“The President has been contacted by the leader of those ships up there,” Colonel O’Neill said, to dead silence. “And was given reassurances for peace. Reassurances which he does not trust, and neither do I. The reasons for that you’ve just met.”

“Sir,” Lorne ventured. “The airman I just saw headed Mitchell’s way-“

“Was giving him the same news I’m giving you.”

So those three strangers ranked higher on the President’s confidence than Lorne did, and the rest of the officers on-base, and the Colonel too. They were also higher on the Colonel’s own confidence than them.

Henry was dying to ask if the Men In Black really weren’t just a silly movie, but managed to hold his tongue. If that were the case, they’d have been told so by now, wouldn’t they? Or at least Earth would have deployed their silver bullet before this, if they had one.

Was that what those three were?

“Alright, all of you go, carry out your orders. Except you, Harry – you’ll be taking charge of those three’s escort and be my eyes and ears in the air.”

They all left to do as ordered, and soon they were indeed all in the air, flying at speed towards the McMurdo navy base in Antarctica. The VIPs were all very professional, but otherwise just talking on a private frequency among the three of them. Lorne could’ve breached it, but need to know was a thing.

Unfortunately, they were only two thirds of the way to Ross Island when Henry got a hail from the Colonel, on encrypted channels. A message for the trio.

“Sierra Golf One,” Henry spoke over comms. “We're receiving an encoded message. Stand by…” He decrypted the message and his heart sank. “Message reads: McMurdo has been destroyed. Return to your previous position and stand by for further instructions."

“Understood.”

The F-15s all turned around and headed back the way they'd come. And it was a long way too, too long to make it with what was left in their tanks. They had to top-off from one of the refueling tankers that… had been scrambled en masse some time after they left the previous base. Which meant that, at some point between then and now, the USA had gone from DEFCON 3 to DEFCON2.

Mitchell’s plane was just disengaging from the tanker when the shoe finally dropped.

“Thanks for the top-up, boys… Sierra Golf leader, we're going to be right back where we started-"

Suddenly the tanker was hit by an energy weapon and exploded.

“Fuck!” Lorne cursed.

“Son of a bitch!” Mitchell cursed at the same time. “Carter, break right! Break right!”

That means we break left. Lorne and his wing mate broke left just as the other two broke right. Further bolts from the same trajectory missed them. “Sierra Gulf Flight,” he barked over comms. “Request emergency vector change to 165 at 369. Please-“

“Sierra Gulf Escort, Andrews confirmed,” the Andrews air traffic controller said at once. “Route vector authorized with KC-10 support to the target.” More blasts rained down around the formation, but… the blasts weren’t aimed at them, they were aimed at the city! “Please confirm.”

“Confirmed,” Lorne said blankly, staring at the absolute destruction and death of millions of people. “Sierra Gulf Escort, Five-nine. Good luck, Andrews.”

“Sierra Gulf Flight, Godspeed.”

They turned away and flew away from Washington DC as fast as they could. Their last sight of the USA Capital was of the sky raining hundreds upon hundreds of golden energy bolts that eradicated everything on impact.

The flight was dead silent for a long time, no words exchanged even when they passed near other towns and cities, all of which were being bombarded from orbit like the first.

They had made it all the way from the north to the south-most end of the west coast, and they were staring at the distant rain of fire eradicating Los Angeles, when something finally intruded on their collective disbelief. A whistle from the radio. The encrypted frequency again.

“We're receiving another encoded message with new flight instructions,” Herny relayed to Gulf Leader. “Message reads: The Russians have the other one.” The other what? “Do what you need to do."

“Hello,” Jackson said with the air of someone torn between vindication and tired irritation at permission arriving entirely too late.

Lorne kind of had the same feelings, but not aimed the same way. If these three were Earth’s trump card, why the hell were they only being deployed now?

“Coordinates received,” it was Carter that replied this time. “Stopping for gas. I estimate ETA at 19:30 Zulu.”

“Let's do what we need to do,” Mitchell said as the F-15s sped away from the mainland.

It was night time over the North Atlantic, before someone found a reason good enough to break the moment of silence for the dead. A moment which had by then stretched and stretched to several hours.

“That last KC-135 pilot was a bit stingy,” Mitchell’s voice came with a cautious tone. “Fuel's gonna be close.”

Lorne was more bothered by what he was seeing on radar.

“I have multiple contacts down range approaching at Mach 3.5,” Carter voiced his worries.

“Gliders?” Jackson asked.

Here it comes.

“Yeah, that's a good bet,” Mitchell confirmed. “They're coming through at eighty thousand feet. Sierra Golf Escort,” here it comes. “We must complete our mission. Do you understand?

“Affirmative,” Lorne replied. The F15 had officially never lost an engagement, but unofficial was a different matter. All things considered, going out during an op was about the best end for an active-duty soldier. “Sierra Golf One and Two, proceed to target. We will engage.”

“Here they come,” Carter gave on last warning, before hers and Mitchell’s planes turned and sped away.

Lorne and his wing mate turned 180 degrees to engage the death gliders. He saw a bunch break off to pursue One and Two, but couldn’t do anything about that.

It was an ugly dogfight, those things had plasma guns, and antigrav made them every bit as ridiculous as the files said. Also, they were outnumbered six-to-one.

The only reason they managed to take one of those things down with them was because Lorne’s stomach was much stronger than other people’s, so he could handle harsher turns than even his bird could. Ultimately, he survived only a minute more than his wing-mate, and while his wing-mate managed to eject, he wasn’t so lucky.

Death was so sudden he didn’t have time to feel the heat.

That was how Harry Potter, in the dark of night above the Pacific Ocean, finally woke up and remembered what all had happened.

He’d done the ritual, he’d been successful, he’d skipped lucid dreaming entirely to complete projection of the spirit and soul into the subtle planes. From there, he’d aimed his past life regression with all the precision he could muster and found nothing.

There was no past life, time looped or not, where he lived through a return of the void pretenders. Worse, the more he looked inward and back along his history, the farther back through prior incarnations he had to search, until he may as well have been looking at when the body-snatchers had been on Earth the first time.

So instead of inward, he looked outward. Used all he’d learned of Time at Hogwarts during the day before to chart a path outside.

Until, somehow, he rose higher and higher in – in vibrational frequency? Higher than the physical world, higher than Magic itself until he bounced head-first against a wall. The Wall. Or at least that’s how it translated in his dreams before, like a shell around… everything past which he couldn’t fly.

Except this time he did, because he wasn’t just dreaming anymore. He marshalled all his focus and willpower, all the spiritual strength he didn’t even notice in a mere dream, and smashed straight through.

Holy shit, thought Harry James Potter as flaming debris fell down around him where he floated like a ghost in the sky. I didn’t relive a past life, I went and incarnated in a whole new one! A universe where there were no wizards, or magical creatures, and the Stargate from Giza had not been thrown into the sun thousands of years ago.

Only… something was wrong. The world, the universe – it felt small. Far, far too small, and getting smaller.

Harry looked at the sky. Starts were going out. They didn’t disappear from the sky, but the eyes of the spirit saw things besides the physical light, and he could tell.

The stars in the sky were the real ones. But the lights beyond, the galaxies…

They weren’t there. What lights the sky showed were just… projections of some kind.

The world seemed to slow the quicker he thought, as his entire spiritual body began to… exist at a faster speed the more he focused on making sense of the physical world. Time… was still time, but he was more than a mere ghost. The spirit spanned multiple layers of reality, it seemed, and the higher you ascended in terms of vibrational frequency, the faster you were than everything else.

He flew into the sky and beyond at the speed of thought. It was full of spaceships up here, and he recognized them now. Not just from the vague myths back home, but also because his life as Henry Evan Lorne… was in its fourth iteration? Not counting the multitudes of loops, like when the alternate SGI messed with time to try and steal the main-line SG1’s ZPM that one time. Which he only knew about from reading mission reports, after being sworn into the secret of the Stargate during his first life as Evan Lorne.

That time, he served on a spaceship.

Then Atlantis.

Either Preston B. Whitmore back home was wrong about Atlantis, or there was more than one and the city-ship version just happened to be in a completely different galaxy.

Focus on the here and now, Harry chastised himself as he hovered in orbit. The now where the Earth was being glassed by hundreds of alien spaceships. The here where there was no Magic to turn against them, and no Magical World either, secret or otherwise.

Harry flew in and out of several of the ha’taks as the moment stretched into infinity. All of the system lords were here, except for maybe a couple.

He went to the mothership next, finding it would’ve been easy even without its comparatively huge size and star-like shape. Death was intense and loud when he was like this, and two people had been murdered quite gruesomely in the past few days and change. One was just leftover impressions. The other was still blood and stench.

He found the man and his snake lying on the floor of a grand observation deck, split in perfect halves from mid-spine up. Ba’Al, based on what he remembered of Lorne’s life in the prior timeline. Dead. To in-fighting?

Couldn’t it have happened earlier than this? Humanity was already doomed.

Looking around more, Harry ran into Vala Mal Doran, except she was a host. She had always been a host in this version of things.

It’s 2008, the thought struck Harry like a bludger. It’s just 2008. The aliens are invading in 2008. Is this what’s going to happen back home?

He recalled at least two lifetimes where Harry Potter lived to die of old age, so hopefully not. And…

He had different memories where the aliens didn’t do this, where the things were already dead and gone by this time. He did remember Anubis’ attack, and also knew of the much earlier attempt to glass the planet, by Apophis and his son, which he only knew from reading SG1 the mission reports about it. Now, everything was suddenly different because it had always been different.

This is why I’m only remembering now?

Harry…  he didn’t live out that first life as Evan Lorne, did he? Not completely, not even into his middle age. Same for the second, or the other various loops that were more short-lived than a mayfly. Instead, time rewound to an earlier time. Every time.

Someone messed with time.

Harry looked up, past the bulkheads into the space beyond, and past the distant heliosheath as well. No real extragalactic light reached his eyes anymore. The longer he lingered, the less of the Milky Way itself seemed to go on existing, stars disappearing seemingly at random throughout the rapidly shrinking… event horizon, for lack of a better term of… whatever this bubble galaxy was.

Someone was still messing with time right now.

Harry considered flying out there to see things up close, but he didn’t know what kind of danger he’d be risking, what the nature of the… beings doing this even was. It had to be someone, stuff like this didn’t just happen, it wasn’t how time worked. He may not know enough to do anything with it, but he knew what time looked like, even what time manipulation looked like, and it wasn’t this.

The phenomenon didn’t show signs of slowing down either. If anything, it was the opposite. The longer it went on, the faster everything seemed to move. Instead of standing still, ‘time’ began to move like molasses around him. It was as if the vibrational state of everything was increasing. Because… Because what? What for?

To vanish in a whiff of smoke like everything else?

Harry flew back down to Earth, trying not to think about how sure he wasn’t, that he could trace a path back home where he came from.

By the time he caught up with SG1, he’d descended to their frequency too. He only had to descend half-way, but it hadn’t been as easy as going up.

“Oh, yeah!” Dr. Jackson was saying sarcastically. “Just go ahead and fall asleep back there, Jackson! It's going to be a long, dull ride!"

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Mitchell said, not sounding sorry at all. “How many on our six?

“Too many!”

Eight death gliders caught up then, and SGI manoeuvred to avoid their fire.

“We can't shake them at altitude,” Carter sounded strained. “We're gonna have to go down to the deck.”

“Yeah, we're right behind you.”

The two jets rolled and descended quickly to just above the water.

“I've got another contact,” Carter reported. “Six bogies, dead ahead, coming right at us.”

“Sorry, Sam, we're kind of busy right now,” Mitchell replied as the gliders fired at them. Thankfully, the F15 reputation was well earned, so the strikes didn’t land.

“I don't think they're gliders,” Carter said in realization. “They're MiGs!”

“Jackson, get on the radio!”

Jackson began speaking Russian over the radio

“What the hell did you just say?”

"We're Americans. Please shoot the people chasing us!"

The MiGs flied past the F-15s and engaged the gliders, taking out three of them immediately.

Harry scowled from where he was riding the aft of Mitchell’s plane. I’d have managed that too if it weren’t twelve against two.

“We have been expecting you,” the Russians said over radio. “Good luck!”

“Yeah, back at you.”

A thank you in Russian came over radio, before the MiGs proceeded to engage the remaining gliders while SG1 flew to safety.

“I can see the coast,” Mitchell said a while later. “Sierra, rejoin, we're going to head on down.”

“Copy that.”

Harry stayed nearby for the rest of the trip.

SG-1 flew over half of Russia until they reached an ex-military base. The nearest landing area was some way off, which would make it harder to track them if this was any other enemy. Or if their enemy was actively following them, which they thankfully weren’t. Either way, they had to take a cargo truck the rest of the way.

Once there, they found a hangar where a stargate was standing uselessly, no power source or dialling computer of any sort in sight. When confronted on this, the lone Russian officer had nothing encouraging to say. Everyone else who hadn’t died in the ongoing glassing of the planet, or against the aliens in the air, was at home with their families.

“Where I should be,” the soldier finished.

“I need to speak to the lead scientist on this project,” Carter demanded as politely as possible, given the circumstances.

“He is not here. None of them have been here for weeks.”

“Really?” Mitchell’s incredulity could certainly be excused too.

“We had no idea of purpose of artifact. We named it Anchor because it was found on bottom of ocean.”

Dr. Jackson reached the end of his patience first. “Are there any grown-ups around that we could talk to?”

The Russian officer and he proceeded to exchange several insults in Russian.

“Boys, we need power,” Carter said to distract them.

“What you see now is emergency batteries. We lost main power to facility over three hours ago.”

“Ookay, we understand that,” Jackson said stressfully. “But we've come a very, very long way to use this device.”

“I cannot give you what I do not have.”

A high-pitched noise outside finally alerted the living to the impending arrival of something whose approach Harry had felt a premonition of since before SG-1 had even landed their planes.

“What was that?” Jackson wondered.

“It sounds like a ship. Al'kesh?”

Harry flew up through the ceiling and found that it was, indeed, an al’kesh. The ship uncloaked and landed on top of the facility, extending its shield to cover the whole building. As good a sign as it was bad. Harry looked inside.

Teal’c. Wearing Ba’Al’s mark.

Well shit.

Harry descended back through the ceiling amidst falling debris.

“We must get out of here,” the Russian fretted.

“Hey, your weapon!”

The Russian gave Mitchell a machine gun. Meanwhile, Carter and Dr. Jackson pulled their handguns. The four then ran to the sound of where the ship landed. They got into cover just as rings activate inside the facility, depositing Teal'c and two Jaffa in the room. Contrary to what Lorne knew of the man while part of Stargate Command, Teal'c moved out alone without securing the area. Because of that, when he came around the corner, Mitchell was able to surprise him and hold him at gunpoint from up on the steps.

“Hands up!”

Teal'c raised his Zat at Mitchell. Nearby, Carter pulled her weapon on the other two Jaffa, who begin to draw their weapons as well, instead of having them already deployed as they should have. This was extremely sloppy behaviour. Just two of Ra’s Jaffa were able to take out the entire special forces team that went on the first voyage to Abydos, thanks to superlative skill in stealth and ambush. But here, nothing. From Teal’C! Meanwhile, SG-1 did exert the fullness of their skills. What was going on here?

“Don't,” Carter warned the two, who only froze when Dr. Jackson stepped up to cover them with his own handgun.

Harry stared at the scene. There was no Magic here, but he thought he could see something akin to them all over the Jaffa warriors. Something that had been most obvious when they exhibited their incompetence, and when they decided to consider the tiny handguns as serious threat to their lives. Which they were, but it had never stopped an uninformed Jaffa before. 

“Teal'c?” Mitchell said in surprise.

“How do you know my name?”

“I can do better than that. You're from Chulak, your best friend goes by the name of Bra'tac, and you're the First Prime of… Jackson, whose mark is that?”

“Ba'al.”

‘It figures’ was written all over Mitchell’s face. “What did he promise to win you over?”

Contrary to what Lorne would have expected of the man, Teal’c replied. “The freedom of my people.”

“I'll give him credit for knowing which button to push.”

“Ba'al is dead,” Teal’c volunteered information. For some reason. “Slain by his queen.”

“Oh, don't tell us,” Dr. Jackson grumbled. “Qetesh.”

Teal’c was looking seriously taken aback. “Indeed.”

“Why?” Jackson asked.

“That is none of your concern,” Teal’c replied in what was the first thing he did since arriving that was actually in-character for the man Lorne knew. “Allow us passage through the Chappa'ai and your lives may be spared.”

‘May.’

Mitchell didn’t have it, which was fair. “Or, you tell us what you're up to, and your lives will be spared.”

“My only concern is my mission.” Trying to find reason not to kill people was, however, perfectly in-character for the Teal’c Lorne remembered, if mostly by reputation and those mission reports.

“Which is?” Mitchell pressed.

“To avenge Ba'al's death,” Dr. Jackson answered for him. “The final task of a First Prime.”

Teal’c surprise was very blatant this time, and for once Harry couldn’t blame him. “Indeed.”

A shame this was only possible because this entire confrontation had been so blatantly steered by third-party influences at the start.

“Well, that sounds great,” Mitchell said with false cheer. “We'll help out, right guys?”

“Sure, why not,” Carter easily agreed.

“I'm not busy,” Dr. Jackson did too, because what else could they do?

“Let's do it.”

“I do not require your assistance,” Teal’c said, which was true.

The building chose that very moment to shake, and there was the sound of energy weapons striking it. Looking outside, Harry saw that the place was finally under attack from space. The al’kesh shield was limiting the damage that came through, but it wouldn’t last for long.

“My ship has been detected,” Teal’c said what Harry had just seen. “Its shields have been extended to protect this building and the Chappa'ai, but it will not hold for long.”

Mitchell blinked. “What do you say we all get out of here?”

They two sides faced each other off for some tense moments as the building shook around them.

Finally, Carter had enough. “We can all die here when that shield fails, or we can go through the gate together and continue this discussion on the other side. It's up to you.”

Teal'c lowered his zat. Mitchell lowered his gun. At that signal, the other four broke their standoff as well.

Teal'c held up a small device, turned and made for the stargate. “This device will power the Chappa'ai.”

“I like that,” Mitchell commented as he followed suit. “No hesitation.

The humans and jaffa all walked toward the gate. Harry floated after them, though his attention was beginning to be drawn to the sky again. For some reason, no more stars were vanishing from the sky, but the vibration level of everything still continued to rise.

Debris started to fall onto the gate. Fortunately, Teal'c reached it and placed the portable dial-home device on it. After tapping only four symbols instead of seven, never mind eight, the gate apparently figured out both the right address and its own point of origin and started spinning.

Maybe it’s just a speed-diel equivalent, Harry thought to himself, though he had doubts.

The attack was growing in intensity every second, but finally the gate activated.

“Let's go,” Mitchell yelled. “Go!”

Everyone ran up the small ramp into the wormhole just as the energy blasts penetrated the shield into the building. Harry flew in on after them.

It was strange passing through. He wasn’t dematerialized, even though the spirit was some manner of matter, however subtle and diffused. He remained aware throughout too, got to see the rapid, winding tunnel of blue light in all its shimmering glory, and the stars beyond too. It all went by in a moment though, even though it seemed a bit longer to his accelerated perception of reality.

Since he was self-aware and could fly, he couldn’t resist a bit of whimsy and sped ahead of the others part-way through transit.

He came out the other side first, despite that he’d gone through last, and had the disquieting feeling that something had noticed.

They were underground somewhere. There were three platforms here, separated by walkways from a central core device of some sort. There was open space above and below the assembly. One platform held the gate, one a ring platform, and one a control console.

When the others came through, the Jaffa got their turn getting the drop on SG-1 this time, and Teal’c took Mitchell’s gun and pulled his zat on him when the Colonel finally came through last.

“Give me a reason why I should not kill you where you stand.”

“Because, you're a good man.”

Teal'c only answer was an angry glare.

“Because, somewhere, deep down, you realize we're supposed to be on the same side.”

Teal'c aimed the zat at Mitchell's head.

“Because we can offer you the freedom of your people,” Carter claimed from behind them.

This finally made Teal'c hesitate.

“Really?” Mitchell didn’t even pretend to play along, but then – that earnestness was what enabled him to follow in Colonel O’Neill’s footsteps as leader of the team.

“This is Ba'al's failsafe,” Carter guessed. “It has to be. I think this whole place is his time machine.”

The words ‘time machine’ somehow did what everything else hadn’t, and won Teal’c over. The man deactivated his zat and looked around the cavernous space. He walked further into the cavernous chamber. The walkways lit up as he stepped on them. As he did, Dr. Jackson moved close to Teal'c.

“Teal'c, you have to understand, in the timeline we just came from, the Goa'uld are defeated and the Jaffa are free. Now, Ba'al used a machine to go back in time and change all of that. He made you his First Prime and Qetesh his queen so he could control you.”

Perhaps Teal’c had been thinking about this for so long that every other possibility had been ruled out, but he was still rather quick to say… “This is the secret for which Ba'al was murdered.”

“So that's why you think Qetesh is on her way here?” Mitchell asked. “She wants to use this device for herself.”

“That cannot be allowed to happen,” Teal’c declared.

“See? We agree about everything.”

“Teal'c,” Carter looked around, spotting the console. “If you let us use this device, we can return history to the way it was meant to be.”

“The Goa'uld will be gone?”

Carter nodded.

“My people will be free?” Just like that, it was good that he chose to do this but…

“You have our word.”

Was it really so easy?

Teal'c looked at each of the members of SG-1. “Let it be done.”

Apparently, it was. For better or worse.

Carter rushed to the control console. There was a light blue globe at the centre of it. “It'll just take me a few minutes to figure out exactly how it works.”

“That may be all the time we have,” Teal’c replied, handing Mitchell his machine gun. “By my reckoning, Qetesh will be here at any moment.”

The point was clear. “Thank you,” Mitchell said, surveying the room while they all moved to the console as well. “Well, you heard the man.”

At Carter’s handling of the inputs, lights began to move over the sphere. Suddenly a representation of the Milky Way appeared at the top of the tower core. Many stars were visible in the gases. All the stars that still existed were there. And none of the starts whose disappearance Harry had noted previously.

“There must be satellites orbiting every one of these stars,” Carter deduced, probably correctly since Ba’Al was clearly not responsible for whatever was messing with reality on such a ridiculous scale. “There's hundreds of them, each sending real-time telemetry back to this computer through sub-space.”

Mitchell glanced at her. “Exactly how does that add up to a time machine?”

Carter pushed on the globe. “They're looking for something specific.” In the hologram above, one of the stars grew into a sun and sped down to float above them where they could see it up close. Readings appeared next to it.

Dr. Jackson stared. “Solar flares.”

“Exactly,” Carter said in a eureka moment. “Until now, other than Ancient technology, the only way we know of traveling backward and forward through time is to pass through a wormhole as it intersects the magnetic field of a solar flare.” Evan Lorne recalled reading about that, but Harry Potter had some choice things to say- “Now with enough satellites and enough computing—"

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's brilliant,” Mitchell interrupted as he came to terms with the terrible lack of good cover around the place. “Which button do we press?”

“Yeah,” Dr. Jackson mused. “I think it's a little more complicated than that.”

The sun disappeared. “Actually, not much. We just need to choose a time and place sometime before Ba'al can put his plan into motion.”

Because every SG-1 mission ran on drama, that was the precise moment when the ring platform activated.

“They are here,” Teal’c noted unnecessarily, and he and the two Jaffa prepared to fight.

Mitchell became more urgent too. “Sam.”

“Well, if you want to go back to the Cretaceous period, we can go right now, otherwise we have to wait for a flare capable of sending us back to a time and place that's a little more useful.”

Mitchell handed Dr. Jackson a pistol, which was not a moment too soon because he had barely enough time to take aim on the Jaffa appearing on the transport platform.

The next couple of minutes were a nasty firefight, where Mitchell, Jackson, Teal'c and his two Jaffa had only the luck of the draw on their side, and they only survived if they shot before the arriving Jaffa had time to aim their own weapons. The first and second group of enemies were dispatched this way, in a hail of plasma blasts from the three Jaffa, bullets from Mitchell’s machine gun, and Dr. Jackson’s two pistols.

But the reinforcements took their toll soon enough. Teal’c two jaffa died first, mainly because Mitchell and Jackson had gotten the better cover spots. All the while, a new sun would descend above Carter, only to disappear like the others.

“Sam!” Jackson called as a third group of Jaffa arrived by the rings.

Her only reply was to toss him her pistol, which he began firing. Another sun appeared in front of Carter. “I've found one, but you're not going to like it!”

“Why not?” Mitchell yelled over the gunfire.

“It'll send us back to 1929.”

“That's ten years too soon!

Jackson disagreed. “Well, it'll have to do, because I'm just about out of bullets—”

His words cut off as a staff blast finally found him. It hit him in the abdomen and sent him falling over the edge of the platform. Carter stared for a moment in shock, then went back to work while Mitchell and Teal'c kept firing. “Once I dial the Stargate, we'll have less than twenty seconds to get through!”

Putting words to action, she began the dialling sequence.

“Dial it up and get your ass down here!” Mitchell ordered as more Jaffa arrived.

But his order would go unheeded because one of them took a moment to assess the situation, decided Carter took priority, and shot her in the back.

“Carter!”

As if it was Carter’s last spite, the gate activated.

“Teal'c!”

Mitchell dropped his weapon and ran for the wormhole. Before he could follow, Teal'c was hit by three blasts and fell to the floor.

Harry watched Colonel Mitchell disappear through the stargate. He thought of following him through, but his intuition told him it wouldn’t work. Perhaps because he shouldn’t try his luck twice with whatever had taken notice of him before. Or perhaps…

He looked outside past the walls of rock as only the third eye could. Because of that, he got to watch as all the stars left in the sky disappeared all at once, except the lone sun around which this alien planet revolved.

The ring platform activated one last time, depositing Qetesh herself, alone. With a start, she surveyed the bodies, then noticed Teal'c was still alive, lying against the steps to the core.

“Teal'c,” she noted in that ugly growl that Goa’uld all used. She approached the dying jaffa and laughed. “You are the most…” She crouched down beside him, “stubborn Jaffa I have ever known. Perhaps I shall choose you as my First Prime after all.”

Teal’c grunted. “I… think not, Qetesh.” His thumb moved in his clenched fist. “I… die… free.”

With those last words, his hand fell slack, released the hand grenade he’d just primed, lit in red light. Qetesh only had time to see it and realize she couldn’t do anything before it exploded, destroying her and the entire time machine complex.

Bloody alien bombs, Harry cursed as he flew aside and then shot down at speed. None of it had touched him, he was already dead, but it was easy to forget what scale their technology operated as, when his own memories of fighting aliens had more to do with the wraith and replicators. Both were more advanced, as these things went, but the combat doctrines were also very different.

On the bright side, the shock did snap him out of his spectator behaviour and made him remember something that might just be relevant here.

He plunged into the seemingly endless depth as fast he could go. Dr. Jackson’s body was still falling, the bottom of the shaft was very far away indeed. It was good that they wouldn’t need to go all the way.

Harry studied the dead body, and the spirit that hadn’t quite yet accepted the fact.

He reached in, grabbed the man by the arm, and pulled Daniel Jackson out of his corpse.

Either by reflex or because he remembered some of his past experiences with death, Jackson instantly ascended as high as he could go along the vibration spectrum. Harry followed him up, just so neither of them lost track of the other.

“What – where – who –“ Dr. Jackson flailed where he new floated. He wore a white robe now, for some reason. “Who are you? Are we dead? Am I dead? Are you an Ascended? You look familiar…”

Harry smiled crookedly. His combined lives as Evan Lorne amounted to longer than his life as Harry Potter several dozen times over. He wasn’t surprised he still looked like the man he was here. “Major Evan Lorne, Atlantis expedition, second-in-command under Lt. Colonel John Sheppard.”

Jackson stared at him and snapped his fingers. “That’s it, I remember now! You were the one who showed us around on the Unas planet! What are you doing here? Where are we? Why am I seeing you of all people when I’m dying?”

Harry was about to reply to… any and all of those questions when he realized that ‘where are we’ was the most important one by far.

Finally, the planet they were on had vanished like everything else.

Where they were now was a doorway. The inside of it, where Doctor Jackson now stood in a white sweater and slacks, looked like a diner. On the outside of the doorway was a very mind-bending ‘everything and nothing’ psychedelic sprawl that Harry wasn’t sure was entirely real. Or illusion.

He didn’t have time to study it because he stood on the threshold. Literally. One foot inside, and one out. He wasn’t ignorant as to what kind of metaphor this made. And more importantly-

“Great,” Jackson muttered, looking around. Away from him. “This place again.”

This place. A diner. The diner Harry had dreamed about the night before he went on the Walk. Had he… somehow seen this coming in advance? Diviners couldn’t see their own future though, and he had never met Daniel Jackson then, or anyone he was involved with in this life. This entire incarnation hadn’t happened yet, he’d expected to induce a past life regression when he did the Irish ritual.

Instead, he’d ended up living an all-new life as an all-new person in a completely different…

No. Not completely different, he could feel it. Something…

“So,” Daniel addressed the various people sat throughout the booths. People among whom was not found the man with the metal hand that Harry had dreamed arguing with these ones. “I guess this diner was granted ‘infinite’ status after all.”

No one acknowledged him.

“And no Oma either, or Morgan. Lovely.”

“Back to playing the fool, Daniel Jackson?” The bartender asked without looking up from the glass he was polishing. “Were you not the one who drove her to take up her toilsome fate, the last time you were here?”

Misleading through implication first thing? Was that really their opener? What kind of afterlife was this?

Jackson, though, reacted nigh explosively. “I distinctly recall you dooming the galaxy to recurrent tyranny and omnicidal extinction because you wanted to make one of your own suffer.”

The man ignored Jackson.

“Figures,” Jackson muttered. “Trouble making up my mind is mortal ignorance, changing my mind is sub-sapient fickleness, but when I don’t change my mind it’s lower lifeform pig-headedness, right? How is this higher wisdom again?”

Harry turned on his feet as if to enter, and that was when everyone inside gave a start and looked at the two of them where they stood. At him.

“You are new.”

“JESUS!” Daniel jumped in fright. The voice had come from right next to him. The bartender was no longer tending the bar. Without anyone blinking, he was just there now. Right by the door.

“I was right,” Harry murmured, too disquieted to relish his triumph. “There was someone behind this. I knew it. Time does not work this way.”

“You do not belong here,” the unnaturally nondescript man said.

The more Harry looked at him, the less nondescript he became until he had no trouble registering what he looked like. Beyond the stereotypical elderly British senior, there stood a tall, lean man with the bearing of a warrior pursuing what he wanted of Harry with the unerring dedication of a hunter long out of practice-

“Does your master know where you are?”

My what?

Harry had meant to say it out loud, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, couldn’t look away from-

“Oh, so he’s the one you can’t ignore,” Jackson griped, oblivious to Harry’s sudden leap from caution to inner terror. “Please tell me that means you ascended all by yourself and can do whatever you want. Like getting me out of here, hint-?”

Something was happening, beginning to happen, someone – on the cusp of beginning to happen or to end, and it might just be himself if whatever-he-is doesn’t stop trying to get inside his head right now or-

‘Or else what?’ The foreign thought came from that place where Godric usually was.

With a desperate wrench driven by horror and existential dread, Harry evoked himself from that instant when his eyes met the basilisk stare.

He barely caught himself on the doorframe before he fell into Chaos.

In front of him, the diner seemed to tremble as the stranger jerked away and turned to stone with a grinding noise.

‘Olwen’s tits, where are we?’ Godric balked from where the desecrator of mind had just been. ‘Guess we’ll have to fight out way out.’

Unfortunately, Harry remained the weak link in their partnership. He barely started raising the sword when he was incapacitated from all sides by pouncing streaks of startled smoke. Half of them caught the mind-invader before he fell, the rest entangled Harry with gossamer threads of white light. He didn’t know how he’d called the sword to his hand, but it was here, shining deathly green that prevented the others from fully immobilizing his arm.

“What the fuck?” Jackson gasped.

The one of Harry’s attackers who’d just lost his hand trying to grab the sword by the blade shied away from the green light. He swirled away to immobilise Jackson instead.

The grinding had barely stopped when a high-pitched whine replaced it and the mind-violating whatshisname turned back to wispy light and fake flesh struggling not to shiver himself apart. “That – was extremely unpleasant-” His words failed him when he noticed that Godric was aimed at his throat.

“Try it for months,” Harry rasped. “Even just a few days. Then get back to me about whether it’s a fair price for what you just did.”

“You would bring death into this place,” the man-but-not-really grunted as he straightened. The others near him floated away, their outlines rippling as their appearance was replaced by stately faces and immaculate raiment of snowy brilliance. “Death borne upon a soul-bound armament, what a barbaric horror you are.”

“Says the mind rapist,” Harry spat.

“Brazen words from a boy who does not even see the strings he dances to. So be it then. Barbaric problems require barbaric solutions.” With a face void of mercy, the man sidestepped Harry’s sword. “If your master ever deigns to finally reveal himself, tell him to mind his own business or we might just have to mind it for him. This is his only warning.” The man grabbed Harry by the face. “And this is your warning. See what is waiting at the end of this path he has you walking.”

With force not borne of strength, the man threw Harry out of the doorway into the chaotic maze of light-wave tunnel ways.

Harry flew back so fast he barely managed to glimpse the paths and spectres he shot past, before he fell back into his previous life – no, it was-

“Ngh,” Herla grunted as he failed to break the chains holding him down. His mind was clearing despite the potions he’d been tricked into eating at the feast, but his flesh failed him – his strength – he couldn’t muster it. “Why – would you do this? Breach – sacred rite – you-”

The King of the Little Folk interrupted him with a mad cackle. “You big topworlders, always crowding the rest of us aside and imposing your ways, and you’re always so shocked when we hit back!”

“You – must know she’s-“

“Of course he does, dear brother,” Danu’s own voice sounded this time as the possessing thing divested her of her last gown. “Sweet brother. Strong, brave, honourable Arth.”

Herla’s insides twisted in disgust at the deep, growling voice of that creature that had stolen the most beloved of maidens with its glowing gaze, but the potions made his body respond in the most gruesomely wanton way as the body of his own sister lowered itself down on his-

Five months after he’d gone to sleep, Harry James Potter finally crashed awake back in Potter Manor, amidst hoarse shouts of joy and relief that he didn’t have wits to spare for.

Frame of reference, the voice of salvation came from his memories of not that long and far too long ago. You shouldn’t be too hasty to broaden it.

This once, he’d been spared.

But only after living through the end of the world. And the galaxy. And time. And…

Because it was Harry Potter’s lot in life to suffer at the whim of mind-rapists with god complexes, his former life as Herla Cyning now taunted him from the far past, with dread enough to make him want to swear off all carnal acts for the entirety of his life.

The Unified Theorem - Chapter 21

It wasn't a mistake, but alas...

=========================

Chapter 21 - Martyrdom Makes Sacrifices of All

“-. Alonsus Faol .-“

Hagall saved his life.

“Astonishing.”

A ‘lesser’ stave Wayland called it, but the symbol Alonsus had etched on his own breastbone still managed to ward off that first wave of destruction, and had defended him from all other direct magical harm ever since.

“Even now you still live.”

The same wave of magic that killed everyone else in the room, and those outside too as it destroyed the doors, the walls, even brought down the ceiling, it parted around him by a thumb’s width, as did all spells that tried to do him harm after that.

“I compliment you on your stubbornness.”

King Llane, Queen Taria, Anduin Lothar, the guards, servants, all throughout the keep – so many – all fallen, all dead, strewn over the floors.

“Never has one person managed to defy me purely on the strength of his self-delusion, let alone for so long.” The invisible destruction was an ocean all around them now, the demon was carrying it like an aura, but even as it continued to press upon Faol, the mage – the demon gestured and telekinetically lifted a massive slab of fallen ceiling.

“Scutum,” Alonsus rasped as he almost didn’t intercept the slab of wall. As it shattered, he felt the shaking in his skull, his bones, the staves – they turned aside hostile spells, but thrown masonry was a different matter. “Light, be our-argh!” The floor split beneath his feet and he fell to the room below.

Levita-ngh! The destruction – still – the Fel – it harmed the spirit itself, Faol couldn’t cast anything while that wave – that ocean – Together then! The Light could suppress pain, but as his leg snapped at the knee he chose not to spare himself, and instead screamed it out as loud as he could, through voice and spirit both.

“Hngh!” Medivh – whatever possessed him grunted as he felt all of Alonsus’ agony through the psychic scream. “Irritant.” The thing hissed as he nonetheless managed to slow his fall to land properly, though his posture wobbled in the same leg. “You actually made me feel pain.”

It was the first time Alonsus had been able to retaliate, he’d lost track of time of how long he’d been – not fighting, it had to be hours. Hours during which the possessed mage had steadily escalated his attacks. It was all Alonsus could to do defended himself enough to try to save – someone, anyone, he couldn’t save anyone in the end, they were all dead to this – this – the pain – it deafened the ears, blinded the eyes, the mind –

“Weep not for your failure, it was inevitable,” Medivh – the demon said with a mockery of kindness, even as he began to blast him with beams of destruction every other while. Alonsus remained immune still, but the creature had taken it as a personal offense – a challenge – “Sometimes there are no paths to victory, no clever tricks. Sometimes you do everything right, everything exactly right, and still you fail. Sometimes the day just ends, and you didn’t save it.”

A mighty blast of wind threw Faol against the wall. He didn’t know how he mustered the Aegis to survive. He thanked the Light for Wayland’s epiphanies, if not for the protection and healing symbols he’d etched into his own bones – these runes that were not given to harmful miscasts like the hodgepodge of scripts that mages were forced to mix and match via trial and error, even the elves didn’t know where they all came from-

Wayland didn’t do it, Alonsus mind betrayed him. Didn’t etch his bones full of them, is that because there are risks he didn’t share, or he just distrusts himself? Hesitates to use his own-

“Do not let your heart be troubled,” Medivh’s mocking tone took on a threatening cant as the hurricane pressure finally broke. “Lest you realize the eternal punishment that awaits all mortals who presume to defy their god.”

Alonsus slid down the wall and nearly fell further, but he refused to bend his knees. Even though the Light still hadn’t healed him back, he wouldn’t kneel, not to this thing. “True – god,” he panted, leaning against the wall. The agony of flesh mixed with the feeling of rarefied heat inside his chest. “A– true god – would not have – such – an uneasy vanity as to hide your real face from mere – mere mortals.”

“You taunt me,” the demon mused as another chunk of debris lifted from the ground.  “Even now, after you’ve seen how outmatched you are.”

“I’ve – exposed you,” Faol rasped, lifting his eyes to meet those of the monster. “You – cannot trick these people anymore.”

“These people who are dead?” At Medivh’s gesture, the air seemed to pull away from Alonsus, leaving him without breath. “Dead because you could not leave well enough alo-GH!”

There’s only You, Me, Us, connected, Two judgments, Three Spirits, One single Truth regardless of either of our beliefs, the Light Revea-!

“BEGONE!” the Demon lashed out with its Fel power and wrenched Medivh’s eyes out of the Soulgaze just a moment too soon. “Agh – you – you dare…”

I’m a fool, Faol cursed himself as his soul ached, if only he’d practiced the skill more, Medivh – the demon – if it had been Wayland, would it still have resisted the technique? So easily-

“You willful, proud, foolish old man!” The demon snarled as he lashed out with a wave of fire. His other hand covered half his face, his eye – it looked like death. “In trying to serve your Light you would doom yourself and it by looking into the Void itself! Do you have the barest inkling what-“

“A god preaching fear?” Alonsus interrupted him, despite the dread he’d almost glimpsed. He was not interested in what lies a demon had to spread, and you never let an enemy reclaim his balance, even an old man like him who’d never fought anyone knew that. “A mere man can contain in his love more than he can contain in his hatred, warmth raises more than the cold can descend… Even at our worst, the easy spreads more than the uneasy, light reaches more than darkness can reach, the power that unites is greater than the power which separates! If you’re so above us, if a mere man can do all of this, what excuse do you have?”

For a critical moment, the demon was rendered completely speechless.

Alonsus didn’t know if he was panting more from exhaustion or pain, but he had a truth to face now.

At the end of the day…

He was no warrior.

He had no idea how to capitalize on this opening.

“… I acknowledge your will, Priest,” Medivh’s voice was like a judge sentencing a man to eternal hell, and Alonsus, in that moment, completely believed him. The mage’s hand looked like a claw as he raised it high. Outside, something rumbled loudly. “I will make great use of it in the wars to come.”

Doubt flesh’s every word, Alonsus thought grimly. Only now the epiphany for how to finally retaliate came upon him, when it was too late – no! Doubt every word, find your own light! Alonsus mentally recited from Tyr’s scriptures, even as he conjured runes and words from a much newer source in his mind’s eye, forming sentences and incantations with the ones that blazed beneath his flesh-

“Now-”

The long and the short have the same middle, the small circle and the big, the small globe and the big globe lean on the same point, all which is great hides in the little, the seen and the unseen occupy the same space!

“Be Silent!”

A mighty crack like a peal of thunder shook everything as not lightning but a flaming meteorite smashed through the ceiling to impact where Alonsus stood.

The meteor eradicated his whole half of the room and the hallways behind him, and broke the floor along with the next three all the way to the basement, and further still as the shockwave cratered the earth where it struck. Behind him, the castle creaked ominously as load-bearing struts were cracked through.

But none of it touched him.

Alonsus stood as the meteor passed through him, and he fell after it when there was nothing to stand on anymore, but he was slow to fall, because he was as light as the air, as invisible as the light amidst the Light, and even more untouchable than a ghost.

It worked.

He’d always known, down to his soul, that the Light was Grace bestowed only upon true need…

But Wayland was right as well.

Once it had Graced you, the Light did not mind being wielded.

He landed in the dark of the castle’s war vault. He pressed a hand to his chest as he took a deep breath. He was of the world but also not of the world, closer to the Light than Life and Matter. The fire, dust and smoke could not touch him now, and the air itself couldn’t touch him either. But it was enough to breathe the Light.

Even so, the relief at surviving only did what the demon hadn’t, and brought Alonsus to his knees at last. His body was broken, his spirit was tired and so raw it felt like it might well disperse… Every moment the demon unleashed his destructive magic took a toll as his spirit had to exert itself on the stave’s behalf. The creature’s disdain was his salvation there as well, it could clearly focus its attacks into tight beams of annihilation, but it had deliberately escalated in steps just to see how much Alonsus could take – the thing…

It had been testing him, meant to…

Recruit him? Or whatever shell was left after he was demoralized and unmanned, it truly was a demon, Light help him.

My Light is not enough, he concluded bleakly. No normal fiend was this, such power… A hundred priests, his memories scrambled to tell him. It took a hundred priests to contain Medivh when he awoke his powers the first time. His father still died, he was the only one who died, was it murder – no! Not important, what’s important is…

“Brothers,” he clasped his hands tightly together and cast his prayer into the distance. “Sisters,” he reached out as far as he could through Far Sight without drifting too high – too far from the city – there was a forcefield around the castle? Or a spell? Was that why no one came to help? “Anyone who can hear this plea, please lend me your Light, your strength!”

At first there was nothing but shock and confusion, and Alonsus wasn’t sure if he’d just imagined it – they were already distraught? The destruction! The meteor would have been seen from all over the capital!

But then a second Light responded, like a pillar of gold shining up through the spirit world. Then two, then five, then a dozen, more, from every church and chapel. They didn’t know, didn’t understand, couldn’t see more than Alonsus’ unseemly feelings, but they answered in his greatest hour of need. Their Lights were… so much dimmer than Wayland’s, but they were sincere, they were here and…

And they cast their shine through the spirit world like a shimmering aurora that reflected off gleaming helms and feathered wings.

Angels! Alonsus thought with a burst of hope that seemed to bolster all his brethren as well. Angels are here, this means – I can – Wayland said he only had to – we can still save these people!

The hope was like being born again, in the total fullness of strength. His spirit calmed itself. His body mended itself. His clothes were ruined, but his modesty was still intact, which was enough. Unimportant next to the task before him.

Faol filled himself with all the power he could take, bent his knees, and jumped up. High and higher, he was lighter than the dust, enough to ride the air itself. Up above, where Medivh’s voice was no longer the only one spewing curses and incantations.

He cleared all five stories in a single bound.

He found himself in the midst of fire, wind, water, lightning, and hatred churning through the dust from the fallen meteor as arcane might manifest three ways.

Unevenly.

Unfairly so.

“-ncil of Tirisfal, come to stamp down the upstart in the nick of time, is that what you think this is?” Medivh taunted – who? “You could have leveraged your status and your power against my mother and I long before this, even set me up to fail outright! How unfortunate you were so focused elsewhere.”

“Power alone does not confer the right to play god!” Came the voice of Grand Conjurer Huglar as he descended through the ceiling wreathed in the rippling haze of an air elemental. “But you’ve roused us now, and even the Guardian’s Powers will reach their limit eventually.”

“Cleaning up your own mess is not playing God, it's just being responsible,” the demon had the gall to lecture as his arcane shield became more and more visible under pressure from arcane missiles and gale-force winds. “Speaking of, where is my mother? I was sure you’d go running to her first thi-“

The floor under Medivh was destroyed by a sudden upsurge of water. He had to tighten his forcefield in a ball just barely wider than he was tall, and he outright bounced off the ceiling, and the far wall too before flying down to land again.

“Perhaps we have unintentionally allowed a bad situation to become untenable, but if so then you are correct,” said Grand Conjurer Hugarin as he rode the current of his own water elemental up from the lower floor. “Owning that is the only responsible thing to do. You will not be able to hide behind your mother’s skirts this time. The power that has been so misused, that Magna Aegwynn would not relinquish out of pure hubris, it will be reclaimed here and now.”

“Even if it means committing murder?” The thing had the gall to ask as he stood amidst the corpses of hundreds he’d just slain.

Huglar and Hugarin responded with twin blasts of elemental force.

Fire, earth, water and lightning-crackling winds collided with a loud shriek of wafting steam. It kicked up even more ash and dust in the air, and Alonsus quaked in the air from the aftershocks.

Aegwynn, stolen power, old grudges that don’t – what? Alonsus looked around and saw that all traces of Fel were already gone. Medivh’s aura worked to dispel magic traces even more easily than it unmade life, was that how he stayed hidden for so long? They don’t know they’re fighting a demon! 

Alonsus considered calling out, tell them, explain… there was surely a way to control the air even when you couldn’t touch it, Huglar was doing it right now. Could he do it to speak? But how would it help? They already were fighting their hardest, he’d just distract them and Medivh…

Medivh wasn’t trying his hardest. “You claim to be the world’s guardians,” he taunted as he matched them spell for spell without having to incant. “But what power do you even have when you couldn’t take back what you gave my mother? Only the invisible strings of insidious influence, and it's tainted everything you’ve done. What use were you during the Gnoll Wars? Or before?”

The air elemental flowed apart to make way for a charge by the water one. “A war you started!”

“A war I finished!” The tsunami split around a wedge-shaped wall of stone. “The Council of Tirisfal, hah! Busybodies all rotten from the inside with maggots crawling out. It all built up, little by little, over time. That's why Aegwynn took this power for herself. And she was right, wasn’t she? After all, she made me!” The air began to grow hot and dry with the sound of crackling flames. “Someone with equal powers to her, and she didn’t need to lose her own for it! The power of the Guardian exists twice over now, how it must burn that you didn’t think about doing this yourselves. Is that what you plan? I wonder, do you have broodmares lined up alrea-”

Alonsus emerged from the dust and destruction right at Medivh’s back.

“What-?!”

Like a ghost, Alonsus flowed through the man-demon’s shield and reached past the demon’s look of disbelief to grab Medivh’s spirit instead. “Thus didst Tyr spake: virtue does not derive from faith-”

“Res Omnem Annihil!” Complete matter destruction passed through where Alonsus stood, unmaking everything in a yard-wide line behind him.

“-it precedes it! That is why the Light bothers with us at all!”

An even mightier attack came through the spirit world, but while Alonsus felt like he was coming apart, his chant went on, the attack passed, and he was still there.

“You-how?!”

“Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for I dwell in the Light’s embrace!” Closer to the Light than the world, so far out of the world of substance that even the worst of spells were merely glancing blows.

“We’ll see about that!”

Another assault every bit as strong struck him, even as Huglar and Hugarin unleashed their strongest spells upon their enemy. The demon’s shield of stolen power rang like a gong and began to crack.

“Medivh!” Alonsus called to the insensate spirit within. “Awake!” If the mage had handed himself willingly, he’d be awake to serve and obey, not cut off from his own mind by this net hellfire! “I am with you! The Light is with you! Do not worry about salvation, the Light strives to save you, all of us, always! The first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you, it has always been! Accept it! Receive its Grace, as I did!”

With an unearthly roar, the demon lashed with his arm. The blow passed through Alonsus like he wasn’t there, but the entire floor tilted such that the elementals had to flow and reform, and both mages were thrown off balance.

Not Alonsus, for his grip was firm and he was already adrift. “Let Grace work through you, with all your power!” Inside his grasp, Medivh’s spirit tossed and turned, like in a nightmare. “Do not hesitate, do not second guess! Recognize the possibilities in the moment and rise to the challenge offered, embrace them with courage! Hope has not forsaken you yet!”

“You mean that’s not-?” Huglar muttered elsewhere.

“If not Medivh, then – no – it can’t be! Huglar, don’t let up, we have to bring him down or-!”

“Pathetic!” The demon snarled as he was forced to turn his power towards defense from the other mages. “On the cusp of your greatest achievement only to undermine it all by false promises to a fool and a weakling, how very dro-“

“Silence, you wretch!” For the first time, Alonsus Faol’s voice overpowered the monster’s. “Your own nature is proof against your blandishments! Even you possess virtue, or you’d have long destroyed yourself! The only way evil achieves anything is if one retains virtue enough to be a threat! Courage to defy all convention, perseverance to resist the suicidal call of the knife, discipline to hone skill, temperance to control your intrusive urges while your schemes bear fruit! Beast, man, god, titan, even demons no matter how debased, all are nothing without such things! Of us all here, you are the least!”

Medivh’s face twisted hideously. “You presume to judge me?!”

“I am the Archbishop of the Church of the Holy Light!” Alonsus roared with a voice that rang like a hundred bells. “It is my right and responsibility to judge the likes of you!”

The Rite of Judgment Unmerciful descended upon all three of them, bright and terrible.

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water!” Alonsus declared clearly. “When you swim you don't grab hold of the stream, you will just sink and drown! Instead you relax, and float!”

Something in Medivh’s spirit changed, as if a man on the cups of waking, still in the nightmare but aware enough to recognize what control he had over it. Control. Spirit. Power shifting away from the control of the fiend and to him. Spiritual power enough to match a hundred priests.

Alonsus knew just where to put it.

“Beyond the flow of time and thought of the gods, there lies the Living Eternal Fire, out of which all things come and which through everything takes shape. Everything and nothing are its breath, emptiness and fullness are its hands, motion and stillness are its feet, everywhere and nowhere are its center and its face is the Light. Nothing is made without the Light and everything that comes out of the Light is the Life which that takes form!”

Light began to glow up from every corpse in sight as he began to recite from an all new scripture.

“The hull of the fruitful thought is the will, without will thought dries up and is of no use. The patience of the seed is the power. Just as the will and patience of a seed make the feeble sprout push through the hard earth, so does the spirit sprout the soul a new life through the flesh!”

Light began to shine up from the corpses out of sight too, beyond floors, walls, even under debris where they’d been crushed – tragedy in the making, even now!

“I will see what relentlessly distresses the springs of the mind and soul of my fellow, I will bring him the peace and clarity in his mind, and so his life and mine will be like the ripe tree! My bones and my strength will not weaken, and when I return to where I came from, it will be full with the warmth of those who follow in my footsteps!”

Ethereal shields began to rise above the buried dead, shifting the rocks aside – the Arcane! Even insensate, Medivh’s will was pure enough to shape it to their aid, Faol’s words – they reached him!

“The End…” His voice was joined by those of his distant brethren, and even the angels poised above them in the air. “Is the Beginning!”

With a rattling breath, all who’d died that day came back to life.

“Oh ye of too much faith!”

With a sudden wrench like the pull of a hungry pit, the reborn spirits were ripped out of their bodies, all of them, all at once, all over again.

What?

With eyes still locked on the creature’s, Alonsus’ entire vision was overtaken by a starless void as the monster clashed minds with him. His consciousness wasn’t obliterated only because the soulgaze he’d invoked before finally ran its course, and even then it only saved his mind because of all his staves of protection.

As suddenly as everyone around him had suffered second death, the pull of the yawning dark yanked him back into the physical plane with a sickening wrench, just in time to feel as if his spirit was being torn out of him.

A backhand sent him tumbling away with force enough to almost snap his neck.

"You mortals, ever grasping beyond your purpose.”

Alonsus rolled over, tried to look around with blurry sight. The bodies – everyone – almost everyone was dead again, they…

“You cannot fathom the all-consuming void. What can one mote of golden light illuminate within the abyss? Countless stars. Countless worlds. Countless lives. All fell to me. All brought to nothing. All the teeming chaos of creation? Brought to order. Then to flame.”

The spirits – they were loose, falling, pulled towards the creature wearing Medivh’s skin, it – the demon – he was eating them-

“I saw your mind even as you struggled to fathom a mere glimpse of my memory. You never faced any true danger, yet you struggle every bit as strongly as so many have done before. Your courage never wavered. Why? Arrogance? Ignorance? Or perhaps your hope was at the whim of another all along?”

Only sparks remained to rise form the dead, souls bereft of spirit, not even scraps left to live off of, the thing devoured them – the souls were left bodiless in both worlds, naked, drifting loose, away, down ravenous maws and up streams towards a grey sky. A weak pulse of light from the angels beyond lifted the ones falling down, but they only dimmed further. Up and away, beyond hope of life. They couldn’t come back. They couldn’t be brought back, none of them – the angels, they were dim and distant, had the fiend harmed them too? Even them?  Great Tyr, what-?

“It can’t be,” Huglar wheezed from where he’d fallen, near delirious from the soul-deep blow. “Sargeras?”

“Mortals, gods, titans, the Pantheon themselves could not contain me. They tried. And they died. Compared to them, you merely glitter. You fly around me, smaller than a speck of dust. I am inevitable. I cannot be denied. You strike this incarnation with all your might, set against it all your guile and it changes nothing. Now the end comes for you all, and it comes in fire.”

With a snap of his arm, a wave of infernal flame engulfed the fallen from of Huglar, turning him to ash.

Only the other conjurer was left. And Alonsus, and…

And…

“W-what have you done?” came the weak, shellshocked voice of Anduin Lothar.

Medivh’s body froze just as it was about to incinerate the unconscious Hugarin.

“What is this, what – no, no!” Clothes shifting, disturbed debris, a man crawled on the ground with frantic, wheezing gasps. “Your majesty, milady, Taria – Llane… Llane!”

Alonsus looked aside. He saw the shambling form of the Lion of Stormwind crawling, hunching over the dead bodies of the king and queen. His eyes stung, the tears, they… they…

Light curse me for a fool! Alonsus thought in despair. I was granted a miracle – thrice over and I wasted it! If only he’d taken more time, a stave – the Greater Hagall, if he’d drawn the spell on the floor while Huglar and Hugarin kept him distracted, if he’d managed to activate it, would it have stopped all magic in its range? Even…

Even…

“What is this?” the lone survivor of the second death looked around with wide, dilated eyes. “What is this, when… how… Why? Medivh… What have… Tell me this isn’t what it looks like! Say it is a nightmare!”

As if Anduin Lothar’s voice was the key to some deep lock, the demon receded from the man’s face with a last ugly snarl, leaving just shock and incomprehension behind.

Medivh – he awoke – only now – too late, too late, too late!

Medivh looked around with blank incomprehension, stared at the corpses of the king and queen, stared at the broken face of Anduin Lothar who cradled the corpses in weak, trembling arms.

Then he disappeared in a rush of shimmering circles of arcane light. Vanished amidst discordant chimes. Away.

Alonsus Faol stared blankly at the spot he had been.

He’d found Wayland’s demon.

It was the most vile mistake of his worthless life.

“-. Richard Angevin .-“

Antonidas could only teleport them some distance outside of Alterac City, not even on the plateau proper. When he finally managed however, the three of them could do nothing but stare open-mouthed at the sky.

It was completely obscured by a gigantic mushroom cloud.

Uther moved first, setting off at a march towards the city with clenched fists and a stone-cold look on his face. Richard followed, forming Tyr’s sign by reflex to center himself. Antonidas was both the most and least affected of all of them, and he was also the first to break away. He’d been casting detect life spells, and he got increasingly strong returns up until they were just a hundred yards away from the last rise.

They followed him through the forest, and then a massive trail of destruction as if something large and heavy had impacted the woods at an angle. At the end, they found the bronze dragon that had so eluded and frustrated Lord Ferdinand. He was broken, bleeding, and nigh insensate when Richard approached. It took all his strength to cast a healing spell powerful enough to make a difference to such a large creature.

Even then, the dragon didn’t stay conscious for long.

“What happened here?” Uther demanded when Richard’s entreaties failed.

“I – I found my courage…” The beast’s tongue twisted in its own mouth, then its eyes closed and it could not be roused again.

As they were wondering what to do about the beast, a second dragon came down into the freshly cleared heath, red and almost entirely undamaged. “I will watch over him.” She said as if they had no choice but to comply. “You have far more urgent concerns.”

They warily left, though Antonidas broke off from them as soon as they were out of casual detection range. “I must report this to Dalaran,” he said grimly, turning back to where they’d come from. Towards where the Arcane wasn’t so damaged as to make long-range magics impossible. “I will catch up later.”

Richard and Uther continued on to the city, expecting the worst. Expecting chaos.

They got it, but only the tail-ends. Whatever calamity had taken place, the initial shock and outbreak of panic had already run its course. More people were shaking and weeping than running in chaos. When they reached the gates, there was no stampede of citizens fleeing whatever disaster had befallen the capital. Only some sparse groups that were as desperate to get away as they were convinced they’d already suffered the worst.

Some recognized Richard, or at least his crest, and the priestly robes Uther wore. Even then, a few managed to muster enough coherence to explain… far too little. But all agreed on the same things.

Dragons battling in the sky above Alterac City, and inside the castle as well, a great dome of golden Light over the King’s Keep, people panicking, people fleeing, then a powerful flash of light…

Crowds were much thicker inside the walls, more so the further they pushed towards the main square. Here the evidence of a panicked mob was more evident, but also the evidence that it had been cut off at the knees. Walls were cracked here and there, the buildings of everyone wealthy enough to afford glass had their windows shattered. Worst of all, as they advanced to the heart of the city, they saw that the glass shards were actually the least of the worst.

Of the entire population of Alterac city, at least one in four of everyone couldn’t see anymore.

By the time they reached the spot where the walls of Alterac keep should have been, Uther’s face looked like it had been carved out of stone, and Richard had no idea what to think or feel about any of this either.

The only reason they stopped was the cyclone.

A gigantic cyclone of dust and ash whirled where the castle had been, thick, churning, whirling, lifting dust, ash and smoke up to the air as if to feed the cloud that now obscured the sky. The funnel pulled at their clothes and their hair as they came close. Then Richard passed through some invisible outer boundary and the sudden noise almost deafened him.

He stumbled back in shock. The noise was like the aftershocks of thunder, and he’d felt… He’d felt –

He’d felt something, like contact without contact – like he’d felt whenever Lord Ferdinand communed with the little spirits of his, and they tried to talk to him too.

“What is it?” Uther barked over the noise, and that of the muttering, fearful, weeping crowd at their back. “What did you see?”

“They’re keeping the noise contained,” Richard replied, not knowing what else to say. “The noise and – something…” He dared push back into the din, and listened even as the wind and grains raked his skin. He stood still until he felt that touch on his mind. After enough time, enough impressions and images and random recollections of Ferdinand’s random comments came together.

He pulled away, feeling faint. “Lord Wayland’s spirits – they’re containing the noise and – and the poison.”

“Poison?!”

“The air,” came the voice of Narett the Alchemist, to all of their surprise. “The air is poisoned, the spirits are keeping it in the air while it decays, or it will poison the earth for the next hundred years.”

Uther rounded on the new voice, froze in dismay at the sight he made, but it didn’t stave off his demand. “What in all of Tyr’s heaven happened here?”

The answer, it turned out, was something terrible. Something that needed Ferdinand to do something so terrible that it…

It completely unmade the country’s royal seat, and left upward of a quarter of the city’s whole population maimed and crippled.

Richard had no choice but to take charge of the city. When Antonidas caught up with them, he convinced him to help ferry soldiers over, like he’d done at the enclave. They needed more magical help than he alone could give, they didn’t have the luxury of being able to transport squads over a multitude of days.

For better or worse, Antonidas already had his own requests from Dalaran to deliver, for permission to come in in numbers. Richard didn’t bandy words and struck a deal for help bringing his own men over here.

The situation only seemed to get bleaker the more they learned over the next two days. They found Emerentius, but he was almost as damaged as the bronze one and just as impossible to rouse. The Dalaran mages tried to pull jurisdiction over him, like they had already done for the bronze dragon. The red one – Rheastrasza – vacillated between being at odds with them and at odds with Richard himself. Neither party seemed willing to accept that they had no right to Emerentius at all.

All the while, the citizens of Alterac that hadn’t been maimed were switching their animosity from the dead king – and Ferdinand himself – to these interlopers that had invaded their land when they were weak.

From Antonidas’ constant chagrin, Richard assumed the only reason Dalaran hadn’t absconded with either dragon already was because teleportation still didn’t work around the place. Richard had only refrained from declaring it an act of war for the same reason. He shied away of the statement he would make if he dared do such a thing for the whole nation.

He dreaded what his scouts would tell him too, of the movements along the border, or their other armies and lords and landowners in response to the great flash that had been seen from all over the land.

On the third day, the tornado finally began to dissipate.

The spirits still rebuffed everyone trying to get near, even their spells.

When Richard pressed forward, though, they let him pass.

Walking through the wind wall was like trying to pass through a hundred small razors, but the spirits somehow managed not to draw blood too deeply, and the Light healed what they couldn’t hold back.

At last, Richard stumbled into the eye of the storm. There, at the center, it was completely calm.

And naught else.

Alterac Keep had been completely reduced to powder.

It reached all the way to his knees as he pressed forward. If not for the Light empowering him he wouldn’t have had strength enough in his legs to dig through.

Finally, at the middle of a wide crater-like pit, which wasn’t so much a pit as a basin dug by the willful air, he found Ferdinand.

He was lying on his side, motionless and with eyes half-open, half-way buried in the blanket of powder.

Richard called to him, talked to him, asked, said any number of things, but Ferdinand didn’t acknowledge him. He only reacted when Richard touched him, blinking once before allowing himself to be pulled out of the chaff. Back to his feet. Onwards out of the closing dust devil, even though he just stared ahead without saying anything the whole time.

Finally, finally, they emerged from the dust devil together.

There was no rejoicing. Or condemnation. Just a long, drawn-out, judging silence.

The sun began to pierce through the dark cloud in the air after too many days.

It brought no hope, and no joy.

Just a shambling multitude of walking wounded, who could not find any wonder in miracles anymore.

Ferdinand pulled his wrist free of Richard’s hand, walked forward, and sat down on the first thing in sight that was solid enough to bear his weight.

“Bring me first the blind.”

=========================================

Casualties

Stormwind

Note: Attack was limited to inner keep only, hence the small numbers.

1.     Fatalities

a.      King Llane Wrynn (cannot be resurrected)

b.     Queen Taria Wrynn (cannot be resurrected)

c.      Grand Conjurer Huglar, Council of Tirisfal (burned to ashes)

d.     100 men-at-arms (cannot be resurrected)

e.      132 servants (43 children) (cannot be resurrected)

f.      Total: 236

2.     Survivors

a.      Anduin Lothar

b.     Grand Conjurer Hugarin, Council of Tirisfal (comatose)

c.      Medivh, Guardian of Tirisfal (missing)

d.     Total: 3

3.     Foreign Casualties

a.      None

4.     Foreign Survivors

a.      Archbishop Alonsus Faol, Church of the Holy Light

Alterac

5.     Dragon fatalities

a.      Onyxia, Black (disintegrated)

b.     Sinestra, Black (disintegrated)

c.      Korialstrasz, Red (Krasus, Archmage of the Kirn Tor) (disintegrated)

d.     Total: 3

6.     Dragon survivors

a.      Rheastrasza, Red

b.     Kairozdormu, Bronze (crippled, comatose)

c.      Emerentius, Gold (crippled, comatose)

d.     Total: 3

7.     Court fatalities

a.      King Aiden Perenolde

b.     734 nobles

c.      322 servants (32 children)

d.     332 men-at-arms

e.      Total: 1339

8.     Court survivors

a.      Isiden Perenolde (king’s nephew, heir dispossessed)

b.     98 nobles

c.      2145 servants and household guard

d.     636 men-at-arms

e.      Total: 2880

9.     Foreign fatal casualties

a.      Sir Saidan Dathrohan, Stormwind (devoured by Sinestra, remains disintegrated)

b.     35 servants and household guard

c.      Total: 36

10.  Foreign survivors

a.      Lady Mara Fordragon of Stormwind

b.     King Archibald Greymane of Gilneas

c.      Prince Genn Greymane of Gilneas

d.     100 servants and household guard

e.      Total: 103

11.  Fatal collateral (Alterac City)

a.      133 elderly (heart attacks)

b.     34 accidents

c.      15 suicides

d.     Total - 182

12.  Non-fatal collateral (Alterac City)

a.      3235 non-crippling injuries

b.     234 maimed

c.      334 mental breakdowns

d.     22,566 rendered blind

e.      Total – 35,173 – 8,804 (overlap) = 26,369

Bylaws of Babel - Chapter 2

Alternate POV chapters won't be the norm for this story, but I don't want to use cardboard cutouts for characters, never mind introduce too many OCs. Nimrod is in this either way.

EDIT: I've modified the last POV to one Prince Elliriad, since apparently Teclis is much, MUCH younger than I thought and he hasn't been born yet.
==============================================

Chapter 2: It’s the Failure

“-. Hrothgar the Sacrifice .-“

He used to be a lowly goatherd, doomed to a life of ridicule. No favor in the eyes of men or women, never mind the Dread Gods. Bad enough he was born of a thrall, he also lost his father early so there was no one to teach him axe and sword. He was deemed unfit to join the men on the summer raids up until his nineteenth year. Every time the High Chief called all the Graelings to raid, Hrothgar had to stay behind and tend to the goats, much to the cruel delight of Valbrand and his cronies. ‘Haargroth’ they called him at every opportunity, a sound like the grunting of a pig in mockery of his real name.

It would probably have been the same for the rest of his short life, but fatherhood had a habit of making men want more than scraps and horse piss.

He was refused even after he volunteered, that first time, but he was afforded the ‘honor’ of serving the skyr at the feast. So he spiced the drinks of the chieftain’s most braggart bondsman, and then let himself be overheard muttering as he left, such that it seemed like the man next to the braggart had said it instead. That Valbrand was boasting about fucking his wife while he was gone, see how he liked it.

The ensuing holmgang resulted in a bloodbath because Valbrand always escalated things, so it ended up a four-on-four.

With so many sudden vacancies, they had to let him come.

That Hrothgar not only survived that raid, but managed to land the killing blow on that injured and exhausted Bretonnian knight was pure luck. Probably the shit kind, considering the even worse turn his life took afterwards. Not that he helped his situation by trying to become a barley farmer, of all things. At least a goatherd could claim to know his way in the wild.

Hrothgar wasn’t going to come on this one. Valbrand had made quite the raucous scene at the feast, and then challenged Hrothgar to a flyting. Everyone thought he was punching down, and they were right, what did Hrothgar have to boast that Valbrand hadn’t done better thrice over? But they still laughed with the arse, because he was shoe-in for next Chief. Besides, Hrothgar was cursed by the gods themselves, didn’t that mean he deserved every jeer and insult?

After the shitshow, Valbrand declared that they’d all be better off without Hrothgar weighing them down this time, and everyone agreed.

Quietly, shamefully, Hrothgar agreed with him too. He’d have been a no-show at the march even without the Chief’s bondsman coming over to quietly tell him so. He’d just been even more ashamed to tell anyone.

If his son hadn’t…

Hrothgar always knew his son was special, and his son obviously knew it too if he went through the trouble of pretending to be possessed just for his sake. Not that Hrothgar realized it at a time, fearful halfwit that he was.

The sagas all had a point where the hero’s life suddenly took a big turn. Hrothgar was no hero, but at the end of the day…

AROOOOOOO! Sounded the horn.

“Go on, Haargroth!” Valbrand laughed and shoved him forward when the mad charge into the woods started without him, because it wouldn’t do for the real warriors to waste their lives springing the ambush waiting inside. “You’ll never be afforded such high honors again! Go forth and seize your glorhkh-!”

At the end of the day, Hrothgar was a killer just like everyone else.

Valbrand fell to his knees, clutching at his throat as blood gushed out. Because the Arabyan sword he’d mockingly let Hrothgar keep was sharp enough to slice through mail. The look of disbelief on his face was only matched by how Hrothgar himself felt, but he’d expected that so he’d overextended from the start. That’s why the shamshir sliced Roffe’s throat open too.

“You treacherous fu-“ the horse piss in Hrothgar’s waterskin returned to sender with a foul-smelling splatter right in the eyes. When Hrothgar swung his sword this time, Stig’s head came right off because he was a half-naked berserker that hadn’t yet berserked.

Bjeir had already died in the last landing, more’s the pity.

“KNUUUT!” Hrothgar howled in a voice he almost didn’t recognize. “Knut, Chief of the Mammoth Riders! Mammoth’s shitstain, you nutless coward come here and face me!”

Hrothgar’s gamble to stall his own death a few more heartbeats was cut short by a horse’s charge he only avoided by pure luck. “You little rat!” yelled the Graeling King as he lifted him clear off the ground by the throat. “I said no more feuding until we have the castle! You’ll spoil our counter-ambush!”

“N-no,” Hrothgar wheezed in the Marauder High Chieftain’s iron-clad grip. “T-that would be the mushrooms I mixed with the shamans’ water.”

“What?”

The combined fire spell that the shamans had been about to unleash on the forest destabilized and exploded in their faces, with timing more perfect than Hrothgar could ever have managed intentionally.

The fireball was bright, gigantic, and so hot that none of the casters at the center of the ritual circle survived, including the king’s own advisor.

“… You – you!” The High Chieftain, also unfortunately named Valbrand, was so angry he couldn’t speak.

Hrothgar spat in his face and gave a bloody grin. “Don’t force a man to do a woman’s work.”

With a scream of rage, the Graeling King failed to crush Hrothgar’s throat due to the plate gorget, so he stabbed him through his eye with his knife instead.

My life was never going to make you proud, son, Hrothgar thought as life ended. Will my death?

He was thrown aside like trash, but he didn’t feel the fall. He did feel himself becoming lighter and lighter, but at the same time more and more constricted, like – like when you dream you’re awake but you’re not, and you feel like a giant’s foot is pressing down on your chest. Around him was a soft, warm light, but it only made him thrash harder against the weight. Soon it was too much, and Hrothgar struggled to move, to roll away.

Miraculously, he did.

He rolled out of his body, and stood up in confusion to watch the chaos he had caused.

The world was the same, but also colored different. Like the normal shades were brighter, tinted seven different colors, but unnatural reds and purples were trying to overpower them at the same time. He could see around him, but also other things and shapes over them, or behind. Humans and monsters, a forest and a field of steaming blood, and four stained paintings trying to form over each other all around him, only to break into the same many-stacked tunnels of fractured light that he’d seen all those times.

He looked to his right and saw Arabyans spilling out of the forest to take advantage of the disarray. They were backed up by mystics, ogre maneaters, dwarves from that cave along the coast that the King had pretended not to avoid, and even the native Sartosans who’d apparently chosen to support their current masters over the new ones.

He looked left to where the shaman ritual had been, and saw that only a handful of the elders remained to contest enemy spells. The rest of them were apprentices who could barely shoot their bolts far enough to make a difference from the back line. They should be using the chants and hymns to bolster the warriors instead, but they weren’t. They seemed to have panicked. Or the mushrooms finally had them flying through squiggly holes.

The mushrooms were something Hrothgar had found out about while carelessly eating random things out in the wild. No, not carelessly, there was no point in pretending anymore. He’d been wanting to die for years but never made the last leap, so he was hoping to ‘accidentally’ poison himself. Instead, he’d given himself the most euphoric and mind-blowing experience of his life. It lightened the burden on his soul for days, and every time after when he felt ready to jump off a cliff.

Surely the shamans knew about them, they were the most magical thing Hrothgar had ever experienced. They were probably part of their brews already. But he’d counted on that – once you experience a strong taste, milder ones didn’t register for a while, and a similar flavor would just pass as aftertaste. The shamans’ potions were foul-tasting and then some, so they had no way to know he had messed with their water. And it had been so easy, Valbrand always made him do thrall’s work before a battle, it was easy to get ‘volunteered’ to haul the shaman’s water and other supplies.

Or maybe they didn’t use the mushrooms at all and it was all nonsense. Instead of having a spiritual journey. Hrothgar had probably just spent a few hours in delirium every time.

The more normal dreams after the weird light tunnels were certainly ridiculous enough. Losing a goat, looking for it, finding it being eaten by a beastman warlord that was somehow all alone instead of at the head of a herd. Then Hrothgar picked up the creature’s axe – conveniently dropped just out of reach – and made mincemeat out of the thing because the weapon, even more conveniently, just happened to be a Daemon Weapon of Kharnath, one of the bloodthirsters themselves bound to iron that fed on his enemies blood!

If not for the warriors all hailing him as ‘Haargroth, Haargroth, Haargroth!’ after he killed the Graeling king, Hrothgar might have actually tried to trace his dream self’s steps in the real world too. Maybe he was destined for his own saga! As it was, he was clearly just going to be possessed, no doubt to become a stepping stone for the real hero. And since the hero usually turned out to be the scorned son in the epics, the axe daemon would just have to find someone else.

Well, it didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that the vision journey overtook the shamans at a bad enough moment to turn the ‘Glorious Capstone’ of the raid into a shitshow. He’d guessed the amount and timing well enough.

Shame that one vitki got caught up in the worst of it, the good mystics were already outnumbered by the bad ones, and that one in particular been kind to Hrothgar. Well, compared to everyone else anyway.

Hrothgar watched with detached captivation as the Norsii’s triumphant rapine degenerated into a bloody slog without any of the ‘real’ warriors even making it to the treeline.

He heard wings.

Turning around, Hrothgar watched in shock as Valkia the Bloody descended from the sky and planted a daemon axe in the earth between them.

“Hrothgar Fatebound!” said the Dread-Consort of Khorne in all her bloody glory, unseen and unheard to anyone but him. And maybe those apprentices tripping over there. “Be joyful, for you are blessed twice over! Your actions have pleased the Blood God. You have earned your place in his halls for eternity. And you have earned the right to rise again. You, who spurned the Trickster’s meddling without a second thought, take up this axe and seize the fate your Lord laid down for you!”

Hrothgar stared at the daemon weapon from his dreams. He knew, somehow, that if he grabbed the thing, the real one would disappear from wherever it was half-way across the world, and appear in his flesh and blood hand right here.

He stared at the she-daemon. 

Then he began to laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

Because… Because…

Everything the shamans claim are lies, everything the tribe believes is false, everything you do is in service of evil.

“Ahahahahaha!” Finally, his frenzied laughter was expended. “Go ahead, make me laugh some more.”

The rapturous bloodlust was completely gone from the she-daemon’s face.

“I’ve been tormented and humiliated all my life for being the weakest of my tribe,” Hrothgar mocked with bravery he’d never had in life. “So I should let this here daemon devour my soul and possess my body, or you’ll make me suffer the same torment over and over again for all time!” Hrothgar gave one last laugh. He looked at Kharnath’s one and only woman and decided the Blood God had the shittiest taste of all time. “Fuck you.”

“Wretch!”

Next thing he knew, Valkia had him by the throat. He belatedly realized he didn’t have any armor protecting him anymore.

What? Hrothgar thought in bewilderment. But – how can she touch me, she should – son, you said –

Let the lantern take you in and even Chaos won’t be able to touch you

… Shit, he was supposed to go inside the Lantern!

“Your death will last days,” the horned she-daemon snarled in his face as Hrothgar’s spirit began to bleed from his eyes and ears. “And your suffering eons, you will-!”

“Ever heard of Klinefelter’s syndrome?”

Valkia whirled around. “Who dares-what!?”

The moment her eyes were off him, a wisp bounced off her wrist with the faint whisper of a word that made Hrothgar’s entire soul ring.

The man was freed from the she-daemon’s grip and fell down next to his body just shy of the Lantern.

“Hypothetical scenario.”

Valkia the Bloody pounced on empty air and swiped her spear with wings spread wide, looking for the new threat.

“Chieftain Merroc of the Schwarzvolf clan is about to have an heir.”

The Gorequeen whirled left and right with a snarl, the other realm seeping like blood into the world where her spear sliced.

“He’s served the Blood God more than enough to deserve a blessing. The wife’s egg is fertilized by the chieftain’ seed, the babe grows in the woman’s belly, Khorne goes ahead and blesses the infant, and nobody notices that Slaanesh also placed his mark long before this.”

With a roar, Valkia soared skyward spear-first where she thought the voice came from. “Who is this? Where are you? Show yourself, coward!”

“But Slaanesh didn’t do the obvious thing this time.” The – Nimrod’s voice, that was his son’s voice! “Instead of branding the babe like usual, the prime hedonist acted earlier, before Merroc even bedded his wife that fateful night, and made one little change. Instead of the usual one-to-one, the babe inherited one part from the father and twice from the mother.”

Valkia went into a frenzy, thrusting with her spear seven times in the time it would take a man to strike once, but she wasn’t aiming at the right spot, even when she attacked in a sweeping circle all around her. How could she not see Nimrod? His son was glorious, floating straight and stern, bright of skin, clad in vestments made of flowing wisps and strands of purest white and he shone-

“When I catch you, you’ll wish you were never conceived!” Valkia roared.

“The result should be an abomination,” Nimrod continued his tale, always well out of range of the daemoness even as his voice came from elsewhere. “A malformed weakling of a boy, slow of mind, slow to grow, gangly of height, weak of flesh, wide in the hips, not a scrap of man’s grit, the manner and breasts of a woman, certainly no balls on him at all. But Slaanesh fancies himself the prince of perfection, and he had an entire extra half of she-lineage to seep more of himself into, whenever something would marr the perfect image of womanhood as Khorne saw it.”

Valkia’s scream of rage as she redoubled her wild attacks took an almost hangdog edge as a louder, distant, masculine balk of outrage came from unfathomably far away.

“How like a man, isn’t that right Valkia?” Nimrod invisibly taunted the apoplectic daemon princess, even as Khorne’s mounting fury was joined by the most delighted gasp from beyond. And a bird’s squawk. “Live like a man, kill like a man, court Khorne himself like a man, and when Khorne gives you a piece of him like you’ve always wanted, the entire third of you that was really Slaanesh gets to fuck Khorne like he always wanted.”

Hrothgar felt like his body might come back to life just to rub himself to death all over again, as the Warp shook with the delighted laughter of the Pleasure Prince.

Is – is this why Kharnath never made more like her?

That was when the Blood God’s roar of outrage overcame every other noise in the world, and a brass skull came hurtling from Khorne’s Citadel right where Nimrod flew.

Nimrod turned into a wisp and darted out of the way.

The brass skull went on to hit the last of the elder shamans right in the face.

His head exploded.

The coven’s last joint casting backfired, and so they failed to counter whatever spell the swarthy men were preparing behind the trees.

There was a crackling rumble, and a hot blurry haze began to rise above the woods.

“Pathetic trickster, you will rue this day!” Valkya the Bloody vowed where she hovered impotently. “My lord is immortal and all-powerful! No matter what tricks you play, how well you hide, his reckoning and mine will find their way to you. When it does, your suffering will be unending!”

“Your lord’s a scratch,” Nimrod’s voice sounded from seemingly everywhere. “Nurgle, Khorne, Tzeentch, Slannesh, they’ve barely been around for a cosmic second. Nurgle’s a pustule rotting in his own filth. Khorne has never fought a single person in his life, the most he’s done since waking up is squirm in his chair. Before Slaanesh existed, I’d already lived for tens of thousands of years. And Tzeentch, hah! He acts like he owns hope and history, when he can’t even tell apart fantasy from truth without a mortal doing it for him! Lick the feet of your gods of ruin for what little time they can fathom, Man reckons time in kalpas!”

The realm of Chaos seemed to warp under the heavy TRUTH of that word that had never been heard before in the world.

“Hear Me, Willing Slaves of the Wretched and Misbegotten! I Am Libet-Ili Lugal-Marad-Da, King Of Babel And Emperor Of Shinar, the Hunter Of Godly Stature Who Erected the Tower Transcendent upon The Summit Of Wannet-Es-Sa Dun, Sorcerer-King Ascendant Of Mankind from Whom Springs Eternal the House of the Eye of the Lands unto the Star Ocean!”

The Warp battered futilely against the veil between worlds, as the forces of Chaos tried and failed to enact their will upon a True Name released so brazenly.

“Hear Me, willing slaves of the wretched and misbegotten, and know that thirteen years ago it was my first breath that saw the Chaos Gate unmade!”

The colors of the world rippled violently as Valkia’s howl of rage was joined by the covenant daemons of the shamans Hrothgar had killed.

“Life, death, hope, passion, they existed for eons before your gods existed, and they will exist for eons more after they’re gone. Your gods were born, your gods will die, and nothing important will be lost. It might be hard, it might be painful, it might take us a while to pass them, but sooner than later They Will Pass. They Will Pass. They Will Pass, like a pile of shit!”

Hrothgar couldn’t help himself. He burst into guffaws.

Valkia was on him in the blink of an eye.

She’d have gored him straight through if not for a white dove, of all things, swooping between them to bewilder her in a burst of tail feathers.

Suddenly, Nimrod appeared next to Hrothgar’s ghost and kicked him in the face.

Hrothgar barely felt it, his son was hitting him, glaring at him like – why-?

… Towards the lantern, oh fuck! He’d forgotten all about it again!

Just before Valkia would have gotten him, he finally dove into the light.

The last thing Hrothgar saw, before the lantern finally pulled him in, was a gigantic conflagration erupting from the forest like a shrieking cyclone, except made completely of fire.

The last thing he heard, before the calm and soothing warmth of that place lulled him to sleep, was his own voice. Maybe laughing. Maybe weeping.

Constantly repeating ‘they will pass, they will pass, they will pass’ to himself, over and over and over.

“-. Valnir, Chieftain of the Crow Tribe .-“

As the moors went and managed to conjure a gods damned djinn, Valnir of the Crow Tribe experienced the nearly overpowering longing to run over and jump down its throat to finally put himself out of his own misery.

Unfortunately, as ever he was still obliged to his men, so he ignored the yearning to end it all like every day for the past fifteen years.

“This is why you don’t let lunatics bully warriors!” his oldest bondsman Olaf shouted as he rode over with their vitki ahorse behind him, and Valnir’s own mount by the reins. “Brass balls, someone who hates his life only lives on because he hates everyone else more, we live in the Wastes and even we know this much!”

Valnir was walking proof that wasn’t always true, but he may as well be dead so what did it matter? “Seer,” he asked instead as he jumped on his warhorse. “Did you see and hear the same things I did?”

“You’re wasted as a chieftain,” came the mutter from beneath the wolf skull, which was a yes.

But the same words hadn’t been heard to the living. Did that mean the upstart’s power was as worthless as he claimed the Gods were? Or did he deliberately keep the living out of it? Did that bode good or ill? Did it matter?

The shaman hesitated, then removed the folds of his wolfskin cloak to show a smooth brass skull bundled underarm. “The newcomer didn’t do it. He goaded Khorne into dooming us himself.”

Newcomer, not upstart? Interloper?  “A godly act then?” Valnir spurred his horse into a charge, wondering…

“A hero’s feat at least!” the seer shouted begrudgingly over the noise. “It’s not like he fooled the Crow himself – ek fyrbýð!“ Gautaz incanted a spell of bewilderment at the Graelings that seemed about to stumble in their path, trusting that Valnir had good reason to ride at their allies instead of enemies.

Their ride had to stop anyway when a massive streak fire sliced right through their path, cooking Norsii by the dozens and lingering like a wall of flame up ahead. Above the trees, the top of the giant flaming funnel began to take a vaguely mannish shape as more and more of the forest came ablaze to feed its rampant growth.

“Chief, what do we do?”

Valnir looked at the djinn. And the messy battlefield. His eyes saw the world as it was, and the things unseen on the threshold too. The colors of witchery were being sucked into the fire creature. The pact spirits of the many dead shamans were braying for vengeance that no one could give them. Valkia the Bloody was gone, vanished to be useless to the living somewhere else the moment Khorne fell silent again. Only the laugh of Slaanesh still brayed. If the Wanton Shornal was excited because the newcomer’s story was true, or because it was the greatest idea he’d ever heard, Valnir didn’t know and he didn’t care.

On the corpse of the poor fool who’d caused the whole mess and then spat in the Gods’ face when offered ultimate glory, a white bird stood undaunted by the death and the flames.

The White Dove. The hopeless spirit that failed eternally to save their souls, even all the way up north where she had no hope. The seers all warned against her blandishments, said she’d doom them by making them soft and pitying. But Valnir, whose whole existence was a hopeless task from start to end, may as well be her kindred spirit.

Did… did he suddenly feel a stirring in his dead soul?

… At least the poor fool had reasons for his despair, unlike me. “Get me one of the Graeling banners, and the tribal necklace of that dead bondsman of their High Chief over there!” Knowing his command would be heeded, Valnir charged forward and jumped over and through the flames, because Kelp was as brave a horse as the Chaos Wastes bred.

He jumped off even before Kelp skid to a halt. Went to one knee next to the corpse. The equipment was surprisingly good for such an ill-treated warrior, and the corpses around him proved the Mammoth Riders couldn’t judge for shit. If Valnir had known the mighty Graelings were prone to such waste, he’d have gone with the suggestion to sail the long way and approach the Bjornling instead. They were more like the southerners than any of them, and the contempt was mutual, but they still kept thralls and they always had food. Besides, with the ‘Chaos’ part of the Wastes gone, they all had to change with the times.

If Valnir could – if he had it in him to care about anything…

… Stirrings, feelings, even ill ones – it had been so long since he felt anything but the yawning hollowness in his chest, was this a sign? Would he believe one? The White Dove’s grace? Did he want it?

If it wasn’t, the heavy stare that wasn’t from the dove was about as clear an omen as he’d ever felt.

He drew his knife. His other hand hovered over the pendant. A small lantern on a chain. It felt like a cozy hearthfire on his spirit and shone to his witchsight like a spark stolen from the Northern Lights in the sky. In that moment, he experienced the utter certainty that the Gods would approve if he destroyed it here and now.

He closed the dead man’s eyes, pulled the pendant off over his head, stared at the white feather suddenly hanging off the bottom of the thing, and stuffed it down his tunic.

It felt… like peace felt like. He didn’t know how he knew that, he’d never had peace in his life. But he still remembered calm from when he was a child, and this was mountains higher than that.

The yawning gap wasn’t gone, but he felt he might be able to see out of it now.

He rode Kelp back through the dwindling fire, charged into the fray, charged past the fray after Gautaz changed his face to that of the Graeling man whose things Olaf had scavenged, and rode around the battlefield to mix in with the Graelings proper.

When he was close enough, he snatched one of their war horns and sounded the retreat.

Valnir was good and gone by the time their High Chief galloped over to erupt in rage at yet another traitor, and everyone was already in full retreat by then.

They should have just finished filling their ships with easy plunder. Alas, the Graelings King decided their momentum was so strong that they could do much better in the sight of the Gods that just goods and thralls. So when they were done sacking Vercuso, Vermunte, Beffardo and Senelite, they didn’t turn west along the high rise to sack Ossomunte and Caprio, the richest of all places on the island. Instead, they poured inland towards the north with the ultimate goal to cut straight through the woods, all the way to Robe and Sartosa proper, and from there assail the Fortress of the Pirate King himself. Perhaps Valbrand even dreamt of founding a Skeggi of his own.

All ruined because the Graelings presumed to decide for the Gods which champions to choose.

Idiots.

“-. Hrami, Vitki of the Mammoth Rider Clan .-“

“What’s a kalpa?”

“An eon.”

Hrami’s eyes snapped up from where he was packing the food, dirt, crushed rocks and powdered metals he’d been ordered to prepare. He was unable to contain his disbelief. It was the first time he ever addressed his ma– the boy first since he was bound to servitude. But he still got an answer as casually as if they talked all the time.

“More specifically, a timespan of 4.32 billion years.”

“… You’re not surprised.” It was the only explanation for the complete indifference that Hrami could think of. He’d expected – he didn’t know if he’d hoped for it or not, that the boy would react violently. React somehow, instead of the disregard he seemed to treat Hrami’s existence with. Everyone’s existence with. If anything were to make him crack, he thought that being blindsided by this would do it. That his Great Boast had been witnessed by someone outside his plans, never mind him. That his secrets weren’t as safe as he might wish.

Instead, it turned out he just didn’t care. Either because it couldn’t be used against him, or there was no danger of it from Hrami himself. Or…

“You’re not-?“ But the answer came to him right then. “You wanted the gods to react like that. There ain’t no mystic that didn’t see at least some of what happened there. The Lord of Skulls practically announced you to the whole world with that roar.”

Hrami hated how much he longed to have seen the whole thing. As it was, he only caught the Hound’s howl, and some choice parts just before and after. He didn’t even know what incited his – the boy to do it, never mind like this. There was always the easy explanation that it involved the boy’s father, but he didn’t trust the easy answer with this – whatever the boy was. Hrami didn’t dare consider it, even in his thoughts. It was blasphemy.

“It wasn’t tactically planned, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Nimrod said absently. “I just made the best of the situation in front of me.”

Hrami tried and failed not to be disconcerted by his flippancy. Did the boy not see him as a threat at all? Even though he was the one who’d blinded him in that eye? Not for the first time, Hrami experienced the overwhelming impulse to lunge across the room and wring the damned boy’s scrawny neck.

As every time before, his wish was obliterated with the feeling of something being churned and squeezed inside his head.

“I’ve never heard the word.” Now that he’d broken the long silence, he couldn’t bear the quiet obedience anymore. “Billion. How high is that?”

“A thousand million, where a million is a thousand thousands.”

“Khargash,” Hrami cursed. “Who’d even need to count so high?”

“You’d be surprised. Or maybe not, depending on what you’ve been sleeping on.”

Hrami hated the jolt of dread that speared through him. “… You know about the dreams.”

“I suspected, and you just confirmed it.” His – the boy said.

How could he be so at ease with it? The things Hrami saw – tales as old as time and others never told, men that never lived anywhere in the world, races that didn’t exist, horseless carriages, carriages that flew, and ships, and more, entire cities that flew, and structures that covered entire worlds while their uppermost spires reached all the way into the Great Dark, and the journeys through the expanse – such impossible spans of time and space, the Star Ocean-

“What I did to you was an improvised patch job,” Nimrod ripped Hrami out of those memories of wonder without an ounce of shame, not looking up from the framed walrus hide he was using as a drawing surface. And to write. Not in runes, but something else. “Memory bleed-through is mild compared to everything else that could be happening.”

Hrami’s hands slammed hard down on the table. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

“Pardon?”

The wood under his hands began to twist and spike under his rage. “What kind of god even are you?! You play mortal up until you don’t, you look down on our best and cavort with slaves, you don’t declare yourself but still punish us for not giving you due, you even feign weakness! When you don’t even need pacts to bind us to your will, or even a measly verbal agreement! No mere spirit can do that, even the Dread Gods can’t do that! Not like this, not for this long, not without-!” Without torment. Without pain. “Why are you even here? It’s like you don’t care about ruling us at all! Is this just a sick game? Are we just playthings, is that it?! Fat lot of difference you are to the rest then!”

Hrami’s heart pounded, his blood throbbed in his temples like it might burst, his fists clenched so tight he even felt a ghost of pain in his wooden arm. He’d lurched to his feet at some point in his outburst, and now he loomed over his little master like – over the boy like there were no fell spells binding him at all.

“Oh I’ll rule alright, it just won’t be you lot.”

The callous answer was like a wash of snowmelt down his back. “You mean to kill us all,” Hrami breathed as everything finally came together in a clear picture. “That’s what all these things are for, aren’t they? The raid – the numbers – you plan to – you lost your power!” Why had he let himself be fooled into doubting that? “You destroyed the Eye in the North, but it broke you too. That’s why you’re hiding. That’s why you’re making soul traps – enough for the whole raid and everyone they bring with them! You – you’re going to kill us all. Destroy us all.” Hrami hated the flash of terror he felt, and the pang of pain in his spirit where his familiar had once been before his – before the boy ripped it out of him ‘for his own good.’ “You mean to sacrifice us all. Devour our souls to ascend – to regain your lost power.”

Of all the answers he imagined, he didn’t think the boy would give him such an incredulous stare. “Sit down.”

Hrami sat down.

Nimrod leaned back in his chair and gave him a long stare. “The reason I’m making these lanterns,” he explained slowly. “Is because every time the Graelings return from a great raid, you lot all gather before the Monolith of Katam for feasting, plunder distribution, dispute resolution, and worship of the gods. This involves the mass sacrifice of at least half the thralls you capture, never mind whoever dies in a brawl or duel because shamans like you teach this is the only way to live. The reason I’m making these lanterns is to save those souls before the daemons can get them.”

He – but – that – that’s it? “You – you can do that? Just – just starve the Gods?”

“Anyone can do that, if someone teaches them.” The boy gave him an inscrutable look then. “Do you want to learn?”

Hrami shied away from the question. “All this trouble for a bunch of thralls?”

“What, you mean like you?”

Hrami tried to cover his jolt with a scowl. “That’s different.”

“How?”

‘It isn’t’ was the only tr – the only answer his – the only answer the boy would accept, and they both knew it. Hrami clenched his jaw and didn’t say it. The boy was strangely soft for a godly tyrant, his geas only bound Hrami to obey instructions, not volunteer services like some sycophant. He still had his mind. His will. Most of his will. “Have your thralls then,” he tried treating the boy like he did him. “When you’re done sifting through the rest of the world, you’ll just end up back here to try and earn our loyalty like you should’ve.”

“Don’t lump me in with the likes of you,” the boy scoffed as he began to roll up his drawskin. “All it takes to ‘win your loyalty’ is murder your big man in broad daylight and everyone will cheer my name. But only so long as I don’t ask you to do more than eat, drink, rape and kill. The moment someone actually tries to build something up here, you murder him so you can go back to eat, drink, rape and kill some more. And when you inevitably run out because none of you work for anything you have except the shit strewn through the streets, you just go and steal from someone else because you have nothing of your own except more thirst and more hunger.”

He should jump across the room and rip the brat’s neck off his shoulders.

“Let’s pretend the Bjornlings are tainted by the soft southerners, but the Vargs, Aeslings, Skaelings, Sarls, even the Baersonlings can at least claim to have some constancy in how they treat right to rule and coming of age. They certainly don’t have their vitki saying to keep a man alive specifically so the rest of you can indulge all your worst impulses, eternally tormented by the most repulsive among you every time your sins catch up with you. No. You Graelings aren’t men, you’re animals. I’d sooner call you cows than humans, a herd of beastmen without the horns. Why would I ever think I can salvage anything from the likes of you?”

Hrami could no longer withstand the insults. He surged to his feet with soul braying for blood, but the impulse to kill was crushed as soon as it came. He fell back down and slumped in his seat, feeling clammy and light-headed.

“I compromised with your lot precisely once – by overstepping my ways to make a slave out of you. Because you’re right about one thing, I am entirely too weak at the moment. But even so, there will not be a second compromise. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve all earned the same punishment I’d usually reserve for rapists in a more civilized society.”

“Ahn-“ He had to wrestle with his scattered wits. “And what’s that?” What would such a soft, naïve g- boy think qualified as-

“Tear off the scalp, cut off the ears, slice off the nose, gouge out the eyes, chop off the feet and hands, and finally leave the sod on the side of the main road for everyone to see. Burning the stumps is optional depending on how long you want his death to take.”

Hrami felt goosebumps. “That’s worse than a blood eagle.”

“But a woman and child would be able walk the length and breadth of Norsca without fear of molestation.”

Hrami shied away from the image of such a land, and the dreams he seemed to remember more and more clearly the longer this went on. “All Norsca?” He asked more leadingly than he’d planned – than he’d meant to. Thought he’d meant to. “Not just our part?”

For the first time, his little mas – the boy beheld Hrami with something other than contempt. “Do you… want me to rule?”

Hrami refused to answer. He tried not to think about how he didn’t know what he even wanted to answer.

Mercifully, the boy didn’t command him to speak, may the Dread Gods curse him to endless torment for making Hrami crave anyone’s mercy, pity, he’d been reduced to wishing for pity, and not just any pity but – but -

“Nobody can feed on souls, by the way,” the boy punctured his rapid spiral of self-loathing. “Well, they can but they’d just get indigestion. Souls aren’t quite irreducible, but they’re close. What entities of the Warp do devour are the spirit, which is just the soul’s other body. You can certainly trap souls though, even torment them, for information, for vengeance, for your enjoyment if that gets you off, maybe eventually coerce them into compliance. But that doesn’t give energy or nourishment, you’re the one putting in effort and energy. It’s always a net loss.”

“The Önd, you mean? They just get the Önd, not the Sal?”

“Notwithstanding the various spells to affect the other parts, mind, body, the third eye of inspiration, your totemic spirit – that crow replaced your real one by the way.”

Did the spirits all lie about this then? What was he saying, of course they would if…

If it was true that none of their tutelary spirits were still around, and they’d all been replaced by daemons masquerading as them. It would make right proper certain the Norsii would have nobody else to turn to.

“Yes, this is a big part of why the Chaos Gods demand a constant supply of new souls,” the boy guessed where his thoughts were going, or he didn’t and it was just coincidence. He didn’t seem to be reading Hrami’s mind. “Their very nature dictates that they inflict themselves on their victims. All their victims, several times over in the case of the Serpent. Chaos spawn, daemons, the Four themselves, they’d all be many times more powerful if they let all those souls move on. But they can’t, because they’re slaves to their own nature. Drunk on power and bitter with impotence, curdling in the malefic nightmare of their own existence.”

The boy gabbed his supplies, took the bag with the dusts and powders he’d had Hrami prepare, and… left. Someplace. To do something. The boy was very firm in what orders he gave him, but beyond them he… never actually explained anything.

Until asked to, maybe. He certainly hadn’t held back from answering all of Hrami’s questions. Especially the ones with the answers he ended up despising the most.

Hrami spent the rest of the day, and the one afterwards, calling on the so-called ‘Jade Wind’ to heal wounds, end blights, banish sickness, and give the land around their hold more life than it had ever had before, just for the practice. He had to guard against misfires, but not as much as before. Some of the spells were draining, but there was always more to draw on after he was done. He hated to admit it, but the amount of power he could work now was several times what the spirits ever yielded for the same time and effort. Especially since the boy ripped out and slew that crow.

Maybe Hrami imagined it, but the boy’s mother served him food a bit less begrudgingly than before too.

The day after, someone decided to be smart-mouthed about his ‘farming’ within his hearing, so he made the inside of his skin grow thorns. He left it at pain this time, and even healed the fool so he didn’t die and waste the lesson, but next time he’d not be so merciful. He had to emphasize that twice, unfortunately, and still everyone was surprised at his ‘lenience.’ The four all damn that boy, if it wasn’t the clan questioning him, Hrami was now questioning himself.

And everything else!

Nimrod returned on the third day.

His gait was lighter. He’d filled out a bit of muscle too. He’d even grown in height despite that his growth spurt still hadn’t come in. If Hrami had to guess, the boy was as tall as he would have been if he hadn’t missed out on any meals growing up.

When they were all behind closed doors, Nimrod took off his bandages to reveal that his eye had completely regrown. He stretched. Wide. So wide his joints popped, and Hrami’s new attunement to the wind of life warned him that the body in front of him had just injured itself. Strained its own sinews to breaking.

Hrami didn’t offer healing. If the boy still allowed him a scrap of pride, he was going to hold onto it as long as he could.

It was all unnecessary in the end. Nimrod relaxed, and all harm mended itself between instants. He didn’t pant and he didn’t sweat, but there was a brief flaming glow to his eyes, and shimmers of gold and red in his veins here and there. The air wafted off him like a furnace too, for that moment.

A god of fire then? Either that or he’d figured out fire magic just by daydreaming about it, which was a pretty godly act on its own. The healing was a tad too clean for fire magic, though, and wasn’t the boy supposed to be unable to work magic while he had Hrami to keep bound? Had he lied after all? If he lied about that, then-

No, wait, no he didn’t. He never actually talked about it at all. Hrami just noticed that he never attempted any magic after the fact, going so far as to make Hrami himself do all such work for him, and then drew the only conclusion that let him keep any amount of dignity. Guess he was wrong to do that too.

“We’re moving up our timeline,” the boy told him after they all ate and the woman was out of sight and hearing again. “The Hound’s barking was the spark that finally set the whole world on fire. Among other things, this means the raid will be returning a bit earlier than they planned. I’ll need you to get some people to start collecting three very specific substances for me.”

The boy didn’t explain anything beyond that, and Hrami didn’t expect him to. He did as he was told, because he had no choice.

His mind was still his own, though. And with the silence broken between himself and the – his little master no matter how much he hated acknowledging it – he couldn’t just keep his commands and the rest of his existence separate anymore. Every day, every moment he failed to find something to busy himself with, his mind kept returning to the god child’s look of complete disgust and contempt. For him, and all others like him.

It was personal. Of course it was personal, they’d made sport out of abusing and humiliating him, and his mother, and especially his father. Because Hrami himself had said it was tradition. The fact it was true only made things worse in the boy’s eyes. Doubly so, probably, since the tribe’s skalds still recalled a time when they didn’t have that tradition. Even still, it felt like more than that. That boy…

This god child.

He truly believed they all deserved to die in the most excruciating way possible.

Hrami…

He…

… There was no one else with more than a white dove’s dream to persuade him otherwise, was there?

“-. Elliriad, Loremaster of Hoeth .-“

The Newcomer had finally made his move, and it wasn’t a feat of strength or magic like his debut seemed to portend. Instead, they got a Trickster.

A Trickster whose Great Boast had thrown Slaanesh into his most obscene throes since the Great Catastrophe, and Khorne into a fit of rage so loud that it shook the Winds all over the world, such that even the weakest mystic must have heard him.

Now, mere weeks later, words from the other Loremasters were streaming in, and they all fit his own discoveries.

Cults were breaking out to do as much damage as possible all over the human lands, Beastmen were going absolutely mad with bloodlust in every forest, orcs and goblins were forming bands into hordes so they wouldn’t be left out of the imminent fighting, even the Asrai and Eonir were gearing up for defensive war like seldom before. Worse, Chaos Lords were finally making their bid for Everchosen in the lands of the Norse. The only place that hadn’t taken a dramatic turn was the Vampire Coast, its ship-felling bewitchments holding just as steady as when they first appeared eighty years ago.

Upon also convening with the Swordmasters, further suspicions were vindicated – the picture beneath the surface was much less bleak. In a move that Elliriad earnestly hoped was intentional, the Newcomer’s display – and the subsequent outburst by Khorne and Slaanesh – had caused all these many cultist and Chaos plots to explode prematurely. Before they had acquired or maneuvered all the assets they could have, or even moved themselves fully out of the danger zone.

Norsca might have been their most urgent concern, if not for one thing.

Alternative concentration and dispersal of Black Arks in the ports of their wayward kin, a comparative ease of scrying mainland Naggaroth, entire chunks of ocean where farseeing weaves either couldn’t look or didn’t see anything besides storms or great banks of mists. 

After thirteen years of the Asur being at their weakest, the inevitable was finally unfolding.

Malekith the Betrayer was coming to Ulthuan, at the head of an invasion fleet.

 ===================================================

“-. Perks Rolled.-“

(see PDF for table format)

Deft Animus Adaptation of the Dragon School - 200 - Re-Spec - HighSchool DxD - Making

A type of Sacred Gear that naturally manipulates energy in a very limited way. Letting you categorize and allocate your reservoirs to different 'stats' to enhance them; the more you devote to one category, the more bang you get for your buck. You can shift your stats around at will to be exceptionally fast or strong at any given time for example, but it would be a trade-off when it comes down to it. The regular Balance Breaker is an armband that allows the user to ‘steal’ energy and magic from the ambient and enemies, while permanently increasing its own. It’s also known to have a sub-species that allows the users to spend energy into brute forcing learning skills or obtaining traits they normally wouldn’t be able to.

(rejected) 600 - Mechanic - Fast and Furious - Domain Vehicles

Machines, especially ones that go fast, just speak to you. You have no problem fixing up and tuning any motor vehicle, and can rebuild them after the most devastating crashes. You can keep anything in top condition with just a few simple tools. Of course, you also need to understand the electronics, so hotwiring cars (and sometimes, alarm systems) is not a problem either.

Biocellular Fission of Marvelous Mitochondria - 200 - Extremis Formula - Marvel Cinematic Universe Vol. 1 - Domain: Databases: Mundane

Another attempt at creating super soldiers, this formula creates a virus that can enhance a person to superhuman strength, reflexes, and endurance. Additionally, normal Extremis users gain the ability to generate extreme amounts of heat through a complex metabolic process, generating heat from their bodies up to several thousand degrees Celsius on any part of the body they desire. When regenerating body parts, the wounds take on the appearance of burning ashes while growing back the lost body part, in a matter of minutes, and cooling into regular skin, flesh, and bone. Be wary however, as this makes you light up on thermal sensors, and should your body heat up too much, you may end up exploding. Keep this in mind.

(failed) 600 - Extended Warranty - Ben 10 0.1 - Domain: Quality: Durability

Let's get real for a second: You are a scientist, not a repair monkey. You shouldn't have to teleport all the way from your home planet to fix something one of your assistants managed to break in the time you took your eyes off of them. As a result, your technology is now durable and long-lasting...you can go years without seeing a prototype of your creation before it actually needs you to fix it directly, even the most idiotic and primitive species being able to guesswork how to fix it even if they don't know how it works. Also when I say durable, I mean the universe could collapse into nothingness and that device of yours would still be floating in the empty void that used to be said universe. Point being, technology you create is both insanely durable and is easily maintained. Now maybe you don't have to handle everything yourself.

Distorted Reflections of the Aquamirror - 200 - Photomirroring - Duel Monsters - Duel Terminal Part 2 - Domain: Crafting: Magical Items

Every Gishki wields their own Aquamirror. But these artifacts are mere replicas of the true Aquamirror, much weaker and limited than the original, even if they still function as potent foci for ritual magics. While the true Aquamirror still eludes you, you've become an accomplished crafter, and can easily replicate all sorts of magical artifacts in much weaker forms. I wouldn't be surprised if a portion of the Gishki currently active are actually wielding copies made by you instead of Noellia. Still, it's gonna take a lot more than this to improve on your copied designs, or even just make them easier to wield.

Banked Points: 200

Understanding Does Not Presage Peace - Chapter 24

One more chapter after this one, and this story

Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time - Chapter 10

With this, the major plot is finally beginning. Next chapter is going to be a surprise, so brace yourselves. Some of you are going to get everything you've wished for.

================================================

Chapter 10: Protagonist – Prompted Plot Progression

“-. November 3, 1994  .-“

Harry had collected his thoughts but was still trying to decide what and how to tell his friends when Albus Dumbledore joined them in the antechamber.

“Harry,” Dumbledore spoke first. “What you just did out there will have everyone from the Ministers to the Unspeakables of several countries wanting to talk to you by morning. That said, they’re busy enough for the moment that we can abscond if you’d rather have a more private talk first.”

“Where’s Nicolas? And Sirius?”

“Nicolas is the one keeping everyone busy. As for Sirius, I’ve remanded Barty Crouch Junior into his custody. He should be liaising with Madam Bones’ office imminently.”

“Right.” That made sense. Sirius was on the Wizengamot and also kind of still on the law enforcement rolls because he was never fired. “Where to, then?”

“Sirius will be using my office to make his calls, and the place would be most prone to uninvited guests and other interruptions in any case, so I’d suggest the Room.”

“No,” Harry shook his head. “Hogwarts is tired, it really wants to go back to sleep, which is already hard with all the foreigners here. The Room is… intense. Let’s –“ Let’s what? Oh, that should work. “Let’s use the Chamber instead.”

There was a pregnant silence, because – because why? Oh. Everyone including Dumbledore was trying to decide if they should broach the sudden and unexpected topic of Hogwarts’ self-awareness. How strange that Harry could just figure out this sort of stuff these days.

“Alright,” Dumbledore decided on no. “It’s rather dreary, even with the flooding cleared, but it will work fine. I will call Fawkes-“

“No need,” Harry shook his head. “I can get us in. I can – I need a way to test something that just occurred to me out there. May as well be this.”

Dumbledore looked at Harry intently, but he wasn’t the sort to casually invade people’s minds anymore. Well, not just anyone’s mind. Not the people whose trust he wanted to keep. Keep deserving, anyway. The headmaster glanced past Harry to his friends, who’d been mouthing words at each other and giving him disbelieving stares behind his back the whole time. “Will your friends be joining us?”

“… I think they should,” and not just because of the impending betrayal on their faces if he said no. Really. “With how long everything seems bound to take, we’ll all be adults by the time any of us can… well, do anything. Or incriminate anyone even if we blab. May as well start early.”

“I am compelled to agree,” Dumbledore nodded. “Very well, then. Miss Granger, if you would?”

Hermione looked more like a windshield deer than on the night of the troll, but then she suddenly understood what was being asked. “Oh, right! Alright, I’ll… lead the way? Follow me then, this way.”

Hermione led the way to the out-of-order girls’ bathroom on the second floor, where they’d once brewed their Polyjuice potion. It was also the bathroom Moaning Myrtle used to haunt, but something or other Harry had done during last year’s walk had convinced her to finally pass on. Which only ghosts that weren’t mere ‘afterimages’ could do, but there was no way to tell if a ghost was more than a ghost until it happened.

No way that the Department of Mysteries may or may not know and weren’t sharing for some reason, maybe.

Well, there didn’t used to be a way. Harry could tell just by looking, after last year.

And, as Hermione passed the entrance to their destination without seeing it, Harry realized it wasn’t all he could see through, anymore. He could see through illusions now too. Well, this one at least. He still saw the illusion, but also what it was hiding. He thought there should be strain on his eyes, or his mind, but there wasn’t.

“Taking precautions?” Harry asked when Ron kept following Hermione to the all-new copy of the bathroom further down the hall. Neville was the only one who noticed and stopped. “Why not just transfigure the whole thing into straight wall?”

“I did, but it did not last,” Dumbledore replied, even as the other two belatedly looked around for them and turned back. “The transfiguration was supposed to be permanent, but it kept reverting. If Hogwarts is as self-aware as you say, it might explain it. Though it makes it doubly strange it lets the extra bathroom be.”

“Probably did it without noticing,” Harry thought about the castle’s behaviour. “Changing the halls – well, changing them back – is like the equivalent of turning in its sleep. The weird space stuff is from when it’s dreaming. Not sure why it didn’t undo the duplicate bathroom though. Maybe it just likes having more things that keep it clean?”

“Dreaming,” Dumbledore muttered. “A castle. Fascinating. Well, after you.”

Soon, Harry was standing before the fake sink. It took him some concentration, and he closed his eyes for a minute or two while he… looked? Looked back – remembered back when he still had the horcrux in his head. When he finally spoke, the parseltongue poured from his lips like he was born with it.

~Open~

The sink slide aside as if folding into the ones next to it, revealing the passage beyond.

“Harry, how did you do that?” Hermione asked when no one else would. “I thought you said you lost the ability with the scar.”

“Something I just figured out back there,” Harry replied while leading the way forward. “You don’t forget your past, and time doesn’t either. Your whole history is always with you. Means you can evoke yourself as you used to be. Just now I did that to bring up the me from when I was still Tom’s horcrux.”

“That’s amazing. Can it be taught?”

“I don’t know?” Harry frowned. “I don’t think so, but… Arythmancy should let you come up with a spell for it, right? That’s what it’s for.”

“I’ll definitely be researching this –“

“Why do you even need to?” Ron decided to be brave. “S’not like you have some great lost talent to rustle back up, and for everything else your memory’s already ridiculous.”

“As I said, I’ll definitely be researching this later,” Hermione talked over Ron, to his most visible dismay. “You’ll help, won’t you Harry?”

“Probably not as soon as you like,” Harry muttered. “Chamber coming up.”

Harry repeated the self-evocation technique when they reached the door to the room proper, but finally the five of them were in Salazar Slytherin’s Chamber of Secrets. It had been pretty well cleaned up, insofar as it could be with all the moss and saltpeter everywhere.

“Guys,” Harry addressed Ron, Hermione and Neville when they were finally at the spot where he’d been petrified, once upon a time. “You know that thing about the Void Pretender body-jacking snakes?”

“The goold thingies?” Ron asked. “Yeah, you told us.”

“They weren’t the real gods. And by that I mean that the gods, the real ones, did exist. They weren’t just wizards, wizards like us didn’t even exist that far back. There was magic but – anyway, point is gods were real, they were almost all giants – giants weren’t dumb like today back then – and at some point, way before Egypt and even Atlantis, before the Void Pretenders even found our planet and masqueraded as them, they all left.”

“Eh?” Ron said for all of them.

“We don’t know why or how, we just know they did. People used to know why and how, but the Void Pretender invasion and the later war against them turned it all into one big confusing mess. It’s why we wizards don’t have much more clear a picture of mythological times than the regular people.”

The other three stared at him like they were already at wit’s end believing the stuff about the aliens, and it had already been a year since he told them that.

“Harry is correct,” the old wizard came to his rescue. “Like the Earth’s rule under the Void Pretenders, this is not a secret by design, exactly, but the events are so old and preposterous that most magical governments are content not thinking about them. The Departments of Mystery are the only ones still keeping records, and regularly consulting with seers like Harry here. It’s not just to make sure the Void Pretenders aren’t coming back, but just in case the true gods might be. Opinions are divided on whether it would be a good or bad thing.”

“Can I have a ‘huh’?” Neville blurted this time.

“Come back?” Ron followed. “From where?”

“The gods were real? And giants?” Hermione seemed to have been utterly upended by the new information. “But giants are barely as intelligent as five-year-olds, and – and there are chocolate frog cards with wizards and witches that muggles knew as gods.”

“Fae and deified ancestors, Miss Granger,” Dumbledore said kindly. “They are one and the same.”

“But giants as gods? Alright, there’s myths about that too, Fin MacCool – and I guess Brann the Blessed was one too? Harry, that was really his skull out there?”

“Yeah.”

“How does nobody know about this?”

Dumbledore nodded in commiseration. “Even the Unspeakable records are all written long after the events, from word of mouth. There was a global war and a great flood in the interim. Worse, the Statute of Secrecy has unfortunately led Muggles to dismiss all mythology as hyperbole or allegory. I assure you, Miss Granger, it was very rarely so.”

“Right.” Hermione rubbed her temples. “Right. Alright, I’ll just – research that later too. Harry, go on.”

“No, you actually hit an important nail there,” Harry admitted. “Giants shouldn’t be so dumb. They didn’t used to be. The reason they are like this is because of… well, because of Magic. I think dragons might have suffered something similar. Magic wasn’t like this before, it didn’t do things for you. Used to be everyone had to use what they could make by themselves, and what they could pull off was – it was all a lot more personalized. Today’s Magic – this worldwide energy field was made somehow, and it works by leeching off the spirits of everyone above a certain level of spiritual strength.”

“Wait, so what?” Ron frowned. “Like one of them vampires, except they suck life energy instead of blood?”

“Almost exactly like that!” Harry snapped his fingers. “Giants – their minds work more off the spirit, and they had really strong spirits. They – well, they were the ones who got the worst of it in order to see Magic born, apparently. Magic as we know it, it was born in huge part from their sacrifice so we could finally fight off the Void Pretenders. The way Bran said it, it was willing on their part… But I don’t believe it was near as clear cut as that.”

“But it does affect us too,” Neville said with a strange tone of voice.

Harry hesitated. “For us it’s not so bad, lot of our thinking is done in the brain, and the long-term memory storage is really low-power, efficient but also because we’re so little. Magic probably does prevent us from advancing past a certain point, I’m pretty sure it’s why wandless magic gets harder and harder until it’s almost impossible for most. My mom could float and make flowers bloom just by wanting it when she was a little kid, but she couldn’t do it anymore after she started school.”

“I noticed that too,” Hermion said lowly. “I know they call it accidental magic, but it doesn’t really make sense that it would go away after we’re trained in wands. And it can’t be a control issue because some of mine wasn’t accidental. I used to make my book pages turn on their own all the time up until I was eleven, and it was almost always intentional by then. But since starting Hogwarts, I haven’t been able to do it anymore. I thought it was because of protection charms on the books, and at home I told myself I wasn’t really meaning it anymore because of the restriction on underage magic, but…”

“… We don’t have any heroes either, anymore,” Ron said after a while, how brows furrowing. “There’s no Hercules or Arthurs, no more Merlins or – what’s his name, Khu Khulein? We don’t see the likes of them being born anymore, is this why?”

“I think so,” Harry admitted. “They are being born, Merlin was from after Magic came to be at least, so there’s that for an exception, but no. People like that just don’t reach their potential anymore.”

“Because it all goes into powering Magic,” Hermione finished.

“Is this why I’m a loser?”

Everyone looked at Neville Longbottom, whose face looked very dark indeed.

“Not this again,” Ron groaned. “Mate, how many times-?“

“It’s already been too many times you’ve had to tell me otherwise, you think I deliberately put myself down? No, I just feel like a loser most of the time anyway, especially at Hogwarts, no matter how well I do with my wand now.” Neville’s frown somehow became even darker, if that was possible. “But I don’t feel like that when I’m in Raptor Mountain.”

Raptor Mountain. Where there was no Magic.

“That’s it!” Hermione realized. “That’s why spells don’t work there, and enchantments – it’s not that Magic doesn’t work in there, it that it doesn’t exist there at all! Harry, who even is Mister Greenwood that he can make places like that?”

“Believe me, the fact I still have no idea haunts my waking hours.” Harry looked at Neville. He wondered what it said that his friend had the self-awareness to realize he was less than he could be, should be. Sure, Neville completely misunderstood the feeling until now, took it as confirmation that he was barely better than a squib when he shouldn’t. But… it was still more than Harry could claim.

Or maybe not. Harry sometimes acted contrary to what should be better sense. He behaved impulsively, even foolhardy, but… with Magic working like it did, didn’t that mean he would have what it takes to handle the messes he lands himself in? He did handle them, even, if with help. With his upbringing he shouldn’t be half as brave, should he? He should be all about keeping his head down, making no noise and pretending he doesn’t exist. That was what he tried to be like when…

When it wasn’t about something important.

“I think,” Harry said slowly, “that we finally know where the other half of Magic’s equivalent exchange went.”

“Or comes from,” Hermione said faintly.

There was a long, awkward silence.

“Well fine then,” Neville grunted brusquely. “Magic’s the same thing making us lame. Is it responsible for some people being squibs too?”

“I don’t know, maybe? The minimum threshold of power – I don’t actually have a way to tell these things, I just know what I got from the Goblet and Bran.”

“Great. Now we know.” Neville clenched his fists. “I’m going to spend as much time as possible in Raptor Mountain from now on, and when I can’t – I guess I’ll just fake it till I make it. Harry, I’m going to write Mister Greenwood for ways to stop this happening, even if it takes completely pushing magic out of my whole house. That’s just a heads up, you don’t need to do anything, I’m sure I can nag him into agreeing all by myself.”

Harry smiled awkwardly. “I’ll ask Charlie if there’s something he can do too?”

“Guess we’re all doing the ‘fake it till you make it’ thing then?” Ron asked sourly. “Starting right now?”

“It appears so,” Hermione said with completely fake calm. “Well, that’s settled then. Was that all, Harry?”

“Actually no.” Pretending not to be grateful for the change in subject, Harry turned to where Dumbledore had been quietly staying out of their conversation. “The Goblet of Fire is a pile of dung. That thig isn’t supposed to be a wooden cup, it’s not medieval, and it’s older than Magic.”

Dumbledore began paying very close attention now. “Explain that as thoroughly as you can.”

“That thing – the enchantment in that thing wasn’t in the Goblet’s originally, it was swapped out of a cauldron and put in as a way to hide it from its detractors – both the space snakes and us. Its maker was Nodens, Nudd, Nuada, whatever you want to call him.”

“A cauldron,” Dumbledore murmured. “Harry… Are you talking about the Pair Dadeni?”

“What’s that?” Hermione asked. “It sounds Old English.”

“It’s Welsh, Hermione,” Neville supplied with that well suppressed disapproval at Hermione not knowing common wizard knowledge. “It means Cauldron of Rebirth, and it belonged to the Irish. They used it to revive the dead, giving them basically unlimited reserves in war, up until it was destroyed by Efnisien fab Euroswydd. He snuck into the corpse pile, and when he was thrown in, he sacrificed himself to destroy it from the inside.”

“’Bout all the good he ever did,” Ron muttered. “He caused that whole mess, and every other mess that he was close to, and it’s what killed Bran too. They were brothers you know.”

“I seriously need to read up on mythology,” Hermione groused. “But there’s so little of it that survives in the muggle world, I need to expand my focus in the Hogwarts library again.”

No one said anything. Ron didn’t want to encourage her, Neville was wrestling with having yet another reason to feel sullen, and Harry because…

Well…

Harry and pinched his nose. He was more tired than he thought if he’d already lsot total control of conversation.

“Harry,” Dumbledore poke when no one else did. “What is it?”

“The goblet, or the magic. Bran didn’t recognize it.” And Harry didn’t know what that meant. “At least, he didn’t talk like it, and he didn’t let me feel one way or another even though he was in my head, I should’ve gotten something. Maybe it’s because he just doesn’t care about anything much anymore, I don’t know. But there’s something I do know – that thing does not resurrect people. It might be able to heal them from death’s door so that it’s hard to tell the difference. Maybe the original cauldron had functons for that if you were a well enough attuned user. But that’s a side benefit of its real function.”

“Which is?”

“Hecatomb.” Harry almost didn’t recognize his own voice. “It harvests every contractor who dies in order to empower the others. It’s an automated instrument of mass human sacrifice. And the fact it drew my name – it really didn’t take much convincing. Taking the raw might of the young in order to fuel more experienced warriors is exactly what it’s for.”

That enchantment – the real Pair Dadeni. Nodens could’ve used it to become a god, maybe make a new generation of gods at the expense of thousands. Maybe he even did, there were enough tales and myths saying the Tuatha de Danann were gods themselves. But Harry wasn’t willing to ascribe such callousness to the… man? Not with everything else he knew.

“Any time now, Harry,” Ron prompted, because everyone else was too wary. Everyone besides Ron tended to treat Harry like he was made of glass.

“You know all those weird things in myths and folk tales? Fae that would heal if you hit them twice, sticks that could kill and revive with either end, that one king that needed his feet held up by a virgin or he’ll die. Those weren’t just tall tales, they all happened, they were – they were Magic’s birthing pains. I don’t have a better word for it.”

The cauldron had been made so that its enchantment would weave into Magic, or be woven into by Magic. There may or may not have been someone else involved too, later when it was moved into the current cup. But things were jumbled, even to Harry’s backwards sight. Everything was jumbled during those chaotic times, which made Nodens’ ability to foresee and exploit those birthing pains… well, godly.

Pair Dadeni was a Terminal of Magic. It was made to be one years before Magic itself came to be, maybe even decades, or longer? Nodens… maybe he lived in those days, maybe he was from older times but was such a diviner that he somehow foresaw Magic’s coming. And its reasons. And its fickleness, especially at its dawn.

“Somehow, Nodens was able to avoid – or use – all of that to his own advantage. When Magic came into being, he seized on the opportunity to both use and bypass the way it works. The goblet – the cauldron it was before – the power from sacrifices is used through Magic to replicate what people could achieve before it existed.”

The cauldron was power theft and empowerment ritual all in one. There was practically no limit to how many people it could bind, as opposed to the goblet, maybe that’s why the goblet was chosen? But the thing still chose both the most skilled fighters and the ones with the most powerful spirit, no matter how young. Especially the young.

For Harry, it might not have needed the confundus charm at all.

“When an undertrained powerhouse dies, his raw power can bolster the older, more experienced warriors to feats of strength previous denied to them,” Harry finished his grim account. “The more died, the stronger the remaining warriors became. From a war’s start to finish, from the starting hundreds to the last man, the strength on the field remained the same, or even grew higher. And not just because more people could be bound at any time.”

The cup didn’t just give the magic, the spiritual power to the survivors, it gave everything Magic made it possible to transfer. The spiritual strength, the stamina, if a giant or re’em died you’d get its strength, blessings could propagate across the contract links too.

The stress on the last survivors was no doubt terrible, but if you survived, there was usually enough regeneration in there to leave you mightier than ever, even if most of the boons didn’t take long-term because of your own limitations.

“That’s horrible,” Hermione whispered.

“It wasn’t back then. The fact the Pair Dadeni became a means of reviving the dead in our myths should tell you how well it was regarded. The cauldron was made in order to get around Magic’s drain on everyone, in an attempt to make it possible for individuals to achieve the feats of might that had previously been the norm. The ancestors weren’t just battle maniacs either, they sneakily bound children by the same drink as the warriors before going to battle. Regardless of they won or lost, and especially if they all died, justice and revenge were practically guaranteed a generation later.”

That was how Cu Chulainn became as mighty as he was, never mind being capable of turning into an enormous rage monster. Ron was right to bring him up. Strength like his wasn’t just exceptional even in his time, it was gained practically instantly, when usually it took decades or centuries for a man to grow so strong even before Magic came along to suck such potential dry for the sake of… what? Replicability of magical feats? Consistency? Power projection?

“Is it really worth it?” Hermione asked softly after a while. “Magic as we know it – if it has such a price…”

Harry honestly didn’t have an answer for that. “Our ancestors thought it was worth sacrificing the future potential for greatness of our whole species, and the entire giant species was willing to be lobotomized in perpetuity. Nodens himself went along with the blood sacrifice of a bunch of his kind, and the perpetual lobotomy his whole species thereafter, just so that Magic could become what it is now.”

“He – he genocided his own species?”

“Or someone else did it and he used it to fuel the rest of the ritual,” Neville guessed. “Grindelwald did that during the Second Great War, used power willingly given by the unrestful dead from charnel fields to fuel spells and rituals. The soviets and Chinese communists did a lot of it too, their genocides were partly run to see if they could squeeze the same kind of power from the unwilling. It wasn’t all just petty evil like the Holodomor.”

Harry Potter stared at Neville Longbottom. Apparently, his talks with Charlie Gordon had gone to a lot of strange dark places when no one else was looking.

“So,” Hermione wrung her hands. “Either Nodens chose to genocide his own species because he liked us so much, or the threat was just that big.”

“And maybe they’d already lost their war and this was his final act of spite,” Harry replied because he leaned more towards Neville’s view now that it had been put into proper words. “I don’t know. I don’t know nearly enough to judge just because the Goblet of Fire is the most despicable thing I’ve encountered in my short and easy life.”

There was nothing like finding out how bad your forebears had it, to give you perspective.

“You’re really different now, aren’t you Harry?”

Harry looked at Ron, wondering what all he meant by that. Of course he was different, he kept finding out the most gruesome things, and when he tried to imagine what danger could’ve driven the ancestors so far –

Harry paused.

On second thought, maybe he could imagine.

This time, Dumbledore had to prompt him when Harry’s mind went wandering. “Harry?”

“According to Preston B. Whitmore’s books about what may or may not have happened with Atlantis, the city was supposedly sunk by misuse of superweapons hundreds of kilometers out at sea.” Harry said slowly. “But what if that’s wrong? Or undersold. Headmaster, you just said that most mythology wasn’t metaphor or allegory. Does that apply to others? Like Hinduism, for instance.”

“I dare say the claims about allegory fit that particular tradition best,” Dumbledore said slowly. “But they are probably exaggerated nonetheless. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that the Brahmastra sounds an awful lot like a nuke.”

Dumbledore’s brows furrowed, even as his eyes twinkled like they so seldom did nowadays. Harry reflexively felt inwards in case – no. Dumbledore wasn’t reading his mind.

He was looking back through his own.

“’Projected with three hymns, Gayatri at its centre,’” Dumbledore recited, and the twinkle was once more absent. “’It contains air, fire and cosmic poison, two goat-like fangs, full of poison, weighty, emits air, contains mercury, fiery, sparkling, sky is filled with air, enemy killing greatly radiant.’” The old man sighed. “Harry, I dare say I now have an all-new reason to stay up at night, and not just for research.”

Yeah, that seemed to be going around like hotcakes. “If it helps, it seemed to have been used by our side as much as the bad guys?” Harry hedged lamely. “And it was just one? Or two? There were counters to it too, I think.”

“Balor’s eye!” Hermione blurted, coming to a conclusion Harry hadn’t seen yet, but which quickly began to fill in blanks. “The Tuatha only won against the Fomorians after Lugh turned it against their enemies. And there’s Lugh’s own spear too, all the other magical weapons, and the ones you throw… If we eliminate the allegory and exaggerations, the power scales probably average out to about the same.”

“There was a rebellion, that’s how them snakes were driven off the planet, right?” Ron scowled. “For it to work, it must’ve been worldwide.”

“And we still almost lost,” Neville said what they were all thinking. “This is why they made Magic, isn’t it?”

“And then some.” Harry muttered, before turning back to Dumbledore. “The spell in the Goblet of Fire wasn’t made to run school contests. Even then, years, decades, maybe even centuries before Magic was born as we know it, the Cauldron of Nodens was made for the eventual war against the Void Pretenders. And it worked.”

Harry could almost put together the ritual that wizard kind had forgotten. With his ability to self-evoke, he could replay the images he’d seen in his head, the scenes of the ritual being partaken, the battles fought. People, wizards and otherwise, would be empowered by the magics collected by the goblet, from the other bonded who fell against the enemy. False gods with glowing eyes in wedge-shaped flying craft, leading animal-headed soldiers, creatures and machines.

There had even been one, great giant with half his flesh replaced by brass and pipes, while bloody necrosis ravaged the rest of him. Giants – they probably couldn’t be possessed like the rest. Like dragons and most magical beasts worth something in warfare, they were too big. A paltry snake the size of an adder had no hope of taking control like they did normal humans.

But the Void Pretenders clearly came up with other atrocities, if Balor of Irish Myth was actually a half-rotted body horror with a wave motion plasma cannon in place of his last eye.

Lugh didn’t turn the ‘eye’ back with a slingstone, he slew the serpent piloting whatever control mechanism had been implanted in the giant’s brain. When the control was disrupted, Balor turned his ‘eye’ on the rest of the ‘Fomorians’ all on his own.

“I don’t know how Nodens did it,” Harry concluded after he finished relating all that. “If he just knew in advance thanks to godlike divination and set up the spell beforehand, or maybe he came back from wherever the gods went, assuming he followed the first ones to the same place…” Harry shook his head. “What I got from my psychometry on the goblet just now, I don’t know who moved the enchantment into the goblet, but someone did. Very deliberately. Specifically to ensure it survived to reach the future in case the Void Pretenders returned.”

That was the big, massive elephant in the room.

The Void Pretenders had been driven out, but not destroyed.

They could come back. No, they would come back.

Everyone back then expected them to come back.

“Well,” Dumbledore sighed. “This is both worse and more than we had to go on before. I think Sirius will be grateful he only needed to deal with the Crouch mess after we bring him up to speed. I won’t lie and say I am grateful for any of this, especially when I thought I already had my hands full worrying about the Dark Lord’s survival and possible return.”

Right, that was still a problem, wasn’t it? How strange, Harry hadn’t thought about Voldemort in months. One Dark Lord seemed such a small threat compared to an alien armada possibly building up for a world-destroying return somewhere in the depths of space.

It was doubly strange because Voldemort was probably more powerful individually than any of them. The Dark Lord had done enough rituals, collected so many powers and strength piecemeal, that he was a fair contender to the heroic prowess of the old days. He’d even gained the might of giants and re’em. And he’d done all of that without the Cup of Nodens as a cheat.

“Alright,” Dumbledore… came to some sort of decision. “I’ll talk to Nicolas. We’ll have to hold a meeting with Sirius and Charles soon, and I suppose your friends will also be invited? That will have to be left for later, however. Current events involving the attempt on your life are more urgent, especially since it seems to be yet another conspiracy to return Tom to the land of the living. In any case, you’ve more than done your part, Harry. You well past due some rest, I think.”

“No.”

Dumbledore blinked, taken aback. So were the others.

“My body will rest, sure enough,” Harry amended, plans coming together in his head just barely fast enough to keep up with his words now. “You all can research and re-research and wonder and plan just fine without me there. Maybe Osiris’ memory will finally give something useful for a change. But it’s high time I started to do something too.”

“Harry-“

“If this is all a false alarm, then I won’t get anything,” Harry spoke over the headmaster as much to interrupt him as it was to convince himself. “But if there is cause to worry, then there’ll be at least one timeline where I lived through the return of those things. That should do for a start. I was thinking it’s high time I finally made good on all my dream practice anyway.”

“That sounds entirely too rash. Decisions made after extreme circumstances tend to go awry. I’m sure if you waited a while, Nicolas will-“

“Nicolas always lets me do what I decide to do, when it comes to stuff like this,” Harry said flatly, even as he worried that Nicolas could always go back on his word and overrule him like he did with attending Hogwarts.

Harry pushed down the thought. And the fear. “I’ve had three whole years where I got to be selfish all the time. But this just got too big, I can’t ignore it anymore. How many omens do we even need to finally start doing something? It’s been three years and we’re barely past where we started. And just now, this whole night – if I sleep it off, who knows how much I’ll lose? Forget? The stuff I saw – felt here in Hogwarts, through Hogwarts, how much will just slip away? No. No more delays. I’m doing it today.”

There was heavy silence at his pronouncement, from Dumbledore and all his friends too. Harry could see that they were all conflicted too, but he decided to keep pretending not to have eyes in the back of his head. He didn’t know how long he’d be able to keep it going anyway.

“Harry,” Dumbledore said finally. Cautiously. Had he waited? Hoped his friends would ‘talk sense’ into him? “It does not do to dwell in the past and forget to live.”

On hearing the old wizard repeat the words from his first year, Harry felt a spike of anger he thought he’d left behind. “That barely made sense when I was eleven, and even then only because it was a cursed magical artefact we were talking about. My whole life I’ve lived in the opposite extreme, I’ve never had any past to claim as my own. No family, no legacy, no history besides years of mistreatment that left me small, stupid and weak. You should know, you’re the one who made it that way.”

Dumbledore’s eyes closed and a tight expression took over his face. “I deserved that.”

He did, but it didn’t stop Harry from feeling bad after his outburst. Even so, he didn’t find it in himself to apologise. “I’m doing it today, Dumbledore,” Harry repeated himself, for lack of anything better. “And I’ll tell Sirius and Nicolas the same thing: you don’t need to worry. I do know about safety procedures. Nicolas taught me a lot, and my ancestors’ barrow ghosts showed me a bunch of stuff even he doesn’t know. Ever heard of Imbas Forosnai?”

The change that came over Dumbledore’s face indicated that he did, indeed, know about it.

“Yeah. That. I’m not much of a poet, but there are plenty of chants passed down, and for everything else? It’ll be easy. Dark room, flagstone near the door, red pig’s flesh soaked in mind-expanding potions, chewing on it while chanting over my palms slick with the same, the works. I won’t even be alone, the ritual explicitly requires people to guard my body and prevent me from being turned over or disturbed. You’ll help me out there, right guys?”

“…What? Oh! I – I guess?” “Right. “Okay, I guess?”

Their agreement didn’t seem to reassure Dumbledore none, but Harry was set on his path, and he was sure he’d get Nicolas and Sirius to go along with it too. They had a very short window for Harry to make the best possible try, all the cleansing parts had been done as part of the preparation for the Walk already. With that behind him, he was just about ready to sleep for a week, which was perfect. After that, they’d get a whole year to use whatever he got out of it, maybe even use it all in the next Walk! It was the perfect time.

Harry understood adults not wanting kids to take unnecessary risks, he even appreciated it more than he could say after the life he had, he really did.

But honestly, at the end of the day he was really just going off to bed.

How much worse than being tortured by Voldemort’s horcrux could it be?

The Unified Theorem - Chapter 20

Combat in Alterac concludes. Next time, the Stormwind resolution.

===============================================

Chapter 20 – On the Back of the Mushroom

“-. Aiden Perenolde .-“

When he was a small boy, a pair of bluebirds built a nest outside his window. Then a cuckoo laid an egg in it while the parents were away. When the cuckoo egg hatched, its first act upon being born was to push the bluebird eggs and two chicks out of the nest. Killed them one after another, right out of the egg. Unable to recognize the chick’s true nature, the parents fed the cuckoo chick until it got several times bigger than both of them combined, only abandoning it when it began to beat them bloody for not feeding it enough. It was the first time Aiden Perenolde witnessed the creation of life, and also the first time he witnessed murder.

The second year, the cuckoo chick hatched too late and didn’t manage to evict the other chicks because they’d grown too big. The parents, having learned from the year before, recognized the parasite and pecked it to death. Upon seeing this, the cuckoo’s real mother swept down, tormented the parents until they fled in bloody tatters, and ate the native chicks in revenge.

Third year, the cuckoo chick once again hatched too late to displace the natives, but the parents’ courage was in shambles. Wary of the adult cuckoo in their midst, they did not attack the parasite. They just refused to feed it until it died, starving and suffocating under their own, real children. Alas for them, the mother cuckoo was no less offended by this, and it came down upon them and their babies with even more ravenous anger then the year before.

After that, year after year, the mother and father bluebirds slavishly fed the cuckoo chick, even if just enough to keep it alive, in the hopes that it would stave off the parasite's observant real parents' retaliatory attacks. Only then did they finally succeed in raising their own children to adulthood.

Ever since then, every time Aiden Perenolde saw someone grasp for power and glory, all he would think about was that elder cuckoo swooping down to eat the babes.

“The cuckoo doesn’t recognize its own nature,” came that hated voice that he nearly didn’t recognize, as the – the worst double vision ever seared Aiden’s soul. “Projecting all the way to the end, are you? Then I’ll be glad to divest myself of my last mixed feelings about this sordid farce.”

He heard a click.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Ysolde warned from across the throne room, stepping over the fallen Archmage. Behind her, the other she-dragon – one none of them had expected to be here but was apparently Ysolde’s real mother – was sinking her clawed fingers into Krasus’ chest as the archmage heaved his last breath on the floor.

Aiden looked up from where he’d fallen on his face. There was a metal pipe aimed at his face, something that looked like – his heart missed a beat. It was dwarven boomstick. Small, it was being held in a single hand, but he had no doubt it would end his life if-

“Some people like to look down on ‘meaningless’ childhood trauma, but I’ve found it pays very much to determine exactly when someone stops being human and resolves to live the rest of their life as a monster.” The Prophet turned his contemptuous eyes away from him and towards his wife, though the weapon didn’t even twitch. “This does not extend to actual cuckoos among sapient species. Either way, neither of you have any excuse.”

“Grand words from someone who invited all his on himself,” Ysolde stepped forward, her half-burned, tattered robes becoming once more pristine between one step and the next. “Trying to start an economic and social revolution in the most unstable kingdom, what did you think would happen?”

“Oh, believe me when I say I made no assumptions at all.”

“What a paltry rejoinder,” his dragon wife scoffed as she began to circle around them. “You had your chance in front of the king, you could have ended it right then but did nothing. It’s such a shame some little babes paid the price and not you.”

“Ah yes,” the prophet said in contempt, circling in the opposite direction of her. When the weapon moved away from Aiden’s head, he felt like he’d shudder from relie- “I’m to blame for an evil man murdering my family because I wouldn’t let myself be kidnapped or murdered. What brilliant logic.”

“Compared to what? Yours? You brought a man back to life in the middle of the public square in broad daylight. But instead of capitalizing on your victory by just ending the problem in the throne room then and there, you instead gave your king an insult he could not abide, and then just walked away to let the problem fester.”

“I should just be murderously reactionary like you? You should have no problem with me killing you here and now, then.”

“As if you can.”

“Well that’s what you want, isn’t it? You’re an unexpected unwanted development I can only react to, so I should do my best to kill you. If I’m supposed to have such poor impulse control that you think I should have gone berserk against the king and damn everyone else who might get in my way, why should I hold back against such an acceptable target as you?

“Spare me your propitiations. They are worthless, they will always be worthless as long as you humans cannot even see that good and evil are all a figment of the mind.”

“You know the most dubious thing about moral relativism?” The Prophet said lowly, spinning his weapon around a finger. “It's never promoted by anyone you'd actually want to be around. It's always the wretch eating a baby who claims that good and evil depend on your cultural baggage.” The prophet aimed his gun at her-

Ysolde – Onyxia the Black Dragon spat flames so fast it had already engulfed the place where the man had been. Aiden managed not to shut his eyes, which was the only reason he saw what really happened. The Prophet shrunk so fast he lost sight of him and then a gust of wind – where did he go?! “Ware, he-!”

CRAK BOOM

A streak of blood flew from Onyxia as she spun to face the new danger, which was the only reason she didn’t suffer worse than a gash across her face. Behind her, the other she-dragon’s head snapped back from a much bigger blast to the belly, shot from a double-piped monstrosity.

BOOM

“GHKAH!”

A second blast caught the scarred woman in her face and sent her flying to crash several feet away in bloody tatters.

The prophet crouched over the fallen archmage, touched him with a glowing hand and grimaced as nothing happened. He leaped sideways just as Onyxia unleashed an even hotter stream of flames. The cone of fire followed his jump faster than he could land.

This time, Aiden saw the flames engulf him, but he saw something else too. “His forcefield,” he rasped, pulling himself to his knees by the fallen statue next to him. “He’s protected!”

Onyxia’s flame breath tapered off with a snarl, but she followed it with a new one from her hands. There was an even stronger gust of wind this time, and her spell was disrupted. She unleashed a frost nova in response. “You humans and your tricks!”

The prophet grew back to size in her blind spot and shot her in the head before the afterimages even faded, he was changing his size somehow and was carried by unnatural wind!

CRACK

Onyxia stumbled forward- “Egtelarcan!” – but she turned it into a spin and unleashed a dozen arcane missiles back on him. Stone dust and chips flew from her hair as the other’s forcefield flickered weakly over his body, she’d cast some sort of stone armor? If she hadn’t, would the hit have –

With a wind and upward wrench, the marble floor burst up in a cage of spikes that trapped the prophet and gored him-

The saint shrunk again and appeared on the opposite side of Onyxia from Aiden before she even recovered from her spell.

CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK

Two shots deflected off Onyxia’s arcane shield, the last two went wide by and got Aiden himself in the side and knee.

“ARG!” He screamed, falling back down when he’d only just finished climbing up.

“Husband! You wretch, your death will last weeks!”

But Hywel was nowhere to be seen, then he was suddenly just behind Aiden and reloading his weapon with a clik – click – clik-

“Oh no you don’t! Telum flamma!”

- click – click – click – whirr – snap.

The flaming bolts went over Aiden and all hit the enemy, one of them actually singing his arm when his forcefield failed just as it struck. Hywel didn’t drop his weapon and aimed just as Onyxia made a grasping motion and swiped-

Aiden screamed at the pain in his wounds as he felt himself wrenched out of the way. He slid to a stop in front of the closed hall doors just as Onyxia hurled a fireball where he and Hywel had las been.

Hywel jumped back, kicked up off the wall – he could levitate? – and shrunk in a haze of afterimages such that he narrowly avoided the flame wave and – where did he go?!

Onyxia’s eyes tracked something unseen and she spewed a flaming breath-

Her throat folded around a seemingly invisible blow. Her flames sputtered as she staggered backwards, releasing an arcane nova and following with a frost wave and forcefield around herself while she choked without air, she-

She opened her mouth almost unnaturally wide, shoved her hand deep inside and pushed her collapsed throat back open with her fingers.

It was just enough time for Hywel to reappear, reload his double-piped boomstick and-

BOOM

Onyxia’s forcefield rang like a gong, but held.

BOOM

Her forcefield vanished just before the shot was fired, why-

The woman had strafed before the shot such that she only took the projectile in the shoulder instead of her throat. Her sleeve tore and blood began to gush out of the wound, but she gritted her teeth and erected a wall of stone with a wave of her other hand. Only then she grabbed her wounded shoulder. “When I’m through with you, I’ll make your petty spirits wish they’d fed themselves to slugs!”

Spirits? Aiden struggled to think through the light-headedness from his bleeding injuries, is that why – how many powers did he have? Wasn’t it enough he could use the Light with such impunity as to-

Wait, he did do that didn’t he? He trapped the entire crowd in the market, when he resurrected that man, the goldn light rose up to churn the sky itself, the clouds – and then that dome around that merchant’s house, why isn’t he-?

The prophet had vanished and appeared behind Onyxia again to

BANG BANG BANG BANG -

She took three hits, grew a dome of earth around herself-

BANG BA-

-and then a second engulfed the prophet where he stood.

A cloud of dusk kicked off the ground between the two balls of earth, as if angry. When Onyxia’s hasty ball of defense crumbled around her, the dust engulfed her face.

“Ack-die, damn you!” Onyxia roared hoarsely, blood trailing down her lips.

The second dome imploded like crumpled paper.

But the dust cloud only billowed even more madly in response, slamming open all but the warded great doors to bring in more powdered earth and glass until Aiden couldn’t see Onyxia anymore in the haze, even though he was on the outside and unaffected.

The crumpled earth shell melted a hole just a finger’s width thick, allowing the gnat-sized Prophet to escape. He reappeared just outside the whirling dust devil and shot inside seemingly blindly, once, three, six times, then he unhooked the spool-like thing to reload, click, click click –

Everything shook. Aiden was thankful he was already on the ground, but the pain in his knee and side flared, and he lost track of the rest of the earthquake in his light-headedness. Belatedly, he remembered that he still had a healing potion or two in his belt, so he did his best not to let is hands tremble too much while he pawed at the case. When the pain vanished, the relief almost knocked him out after all the blood loss.

His head cleared to the sound of wall-shaking gurling roar. Squinting through the settling dust, Aiden Perenolde saw Hywel well away from where he was before. Onyxia was barely standing to one side. On his other side…

It was a black dragon so large that it didn’t fit the throne room, its form writhing and twitching as its shoulder and wing pushed against the ceiling and the walls, the walls – the floor – they shook in tandem with her roars, cracking long fissures that kept growing as black slime-like things squeezed out of the creature’s ruined face and split belly and the roof is falling have to move!

Aiden Perenolde barely got away from a falling chunk of the ceiling, his heart pounding in his ears.

“K’ll you!” The frenzied creature hawked wetly amidst whirling dust and crumbling masonry, the woman – the she-dragon – she’d survived? “I’ K’LL YOUUU̷̝̥͎̦̽̌̋͊̌̉̈͋͗̒̈̓̍͘!”

“Fuck,” cursed the so-called saint as he was engulfed in seething purple flames.

Aiden was prevented to see what came next by rocky prongs suddenly erupting around him to stop yet another piece of falling ceiling crushing him to pulp.

“Husband,” Onyxia called as she landed next to him. She was dishevelled and caked in wet dust all over, blood dripping from her forehead and lips and practically soaking her left arm. She looked back at the other dragon with a complicated, vicious look before turning back to him. “Get to safety.”

The stones and earth were removed from him and he rushed to stand, barely not falling back down as his head went light again. “Wait!” He called, grabbing on his wife’s robe. “He’s weak!” The random facts in his mind finally made sense. “Whatever he did, he’s not as powerful as before. His attacks – his defenses have a limit. Your fire blasts didn’t breach his shield, it just expired! You can outlast him!”

“Well isn’t that just fascinating,” his new wife hissed with dark anticipation. “Go!”

Aiden turned and ran as best he could on his keep’s now constantly shaking foundations. The great doors were still locked, but the wall on one side had an all-new hole. He climbed through, feeling like his throat would turn itself inside out from the effort and dust and glass powder caking the air. But he made it to the other side, and then it was all he could do to keep going.

He still barely made it out. His castle wasn’t collapsing around him, but the unstable floor and the falling candelabra made it feel like it was really, really trying.

Finally, finally he made it out.

He was met with the sight of all his loyalists defeated, scattered traitors running away outside the golden dome, and a bunch of them still inside and arranged as if awaiting a charge for battle. Two dragons were in a stand-off on the outside of the forcefield. Finally, a fourth dragon, a giant bronze one was inside. Sprawled across a quarter of his welcome courtyard, seemingly dead. All around him were corpses of men, women and children.

Devils, how many are there?! How many dragons insinuated themselves in my court?!

The floor shook so strongly then that his light-headedness finally got the better of him. He lost his footing to the earthquake and fell down the stairs, all the way to the ground. It was only his enchanted mesh that let him survive with nothing worse than an added blow to the head.

When he came to a stop, he pushed himself up to all fours and froze when he felt a sharp edge at the back of his neck.

“No sudden moves,” came the voice of Jorach Ravenholdt as he proceeded to disarm him and remove his equipment bags. Even his own assassin had betrayed him. “Get up. Good. Now walk. No no, not that way, we wouldn’t-“ The ground rumbled as a plume of fire and smoke escape through the roof of the keep behind them. Aiden felt his heart stop as the tip drew blood, he’d almost died by accident as Ravenholdt struggled to stay balanced. “Wouldn’t want to give them the wrong idea. That way. Quickly now, or the next time my hand really might slip.”

The traitor led him the way opposite of his loyalists, but that was itself a show of weakness. It meant that there was still something to rally. Aiden could rally them. If he knocked them out of their wailing and muttering he could still change the tide of this disaster, either now or while the traitors fled like the cowards they were through whatever backdoor Hywel left, they could then-

“It won’t work,” Ravenholdt mercilessly ruined his last hope. “Those are the dregs that weren’t as rotten as you. Most who might have helped you died outright. The few who didn’t are blind or lackwits now.”

“The word of a consummate liar can’t be trusted.”

“Quite so.”

Aiden gnashed his teeth. Gods, how he wished he’d lived during the Fowl War.

He was led to a group made up of the King and Prince of Gilneas, Valea Twinblade who seemed to command the strongest force, and Lady Mara Fordragon of Stormwind who seemed to have somehow wound up in charge of everyone. To Aiden’s complete astonishment, Richard Angevin was nowhere to be found.

To his bitter shame, he didn’t dare meet any of their eyes lest the visions come back. To his even greater offense, none of them gave him more than a disdainful glance before Ravenhold was ushering him further away. They were more concerned with watching the keep, and chewing their lips every time it rumbled with flashes and noise.

Aiden refused to walk further even as the dagger dug into his back. “Where is my nephew?!” That was guaranteed to get a response from bleeding hearts like-

“Away,” was the answer of Archibald Greymane, whose manner seemed much more put together than just hours earlier. “His life will be comfortable, all things considered.”

“I demand-!“ Ravenhold shoved Aiden hard with his hand, then a pair of Twinblade’s biggest armsmen grabbed him by an arm each and dragged him off.

Shortly after, he was dropped on his knees near the horse awnings just outside the gates. He quickly jumped back up and looked around. On two sides of him were blank-faced men dressed like commoners but armed with daggers of too fine make. Ravenholdt’s? Yet more traitors, but not from among the ones he knew about, they weren’t anyone he ever allowed into his presence or access to information, he made a point of being thoroughly informed about all of them.

He hadn’t missed any spies or hired blades then, they must have only come for today’s operation. Ravenholdt had indeed been true, until he turned. Aiden didn’t know if he should be more glad or furious.

In front of Aiden, sitting on a hay bale and looking at him with hard, judgmental eyes, was Narett the alchemist. The man looked emaciated and still lacked his hand, but his skin was hale and without scars.

The added confirmation of Hywel’s fall from power made Aiden feel a burst of vindication, but his outrage was still greater. And the fact that he, the king, still had to avert his eyes lest he enter another vision was too much to bear. “Another that would seek to judge me,” he sneered, then scoffed as arrogantly as he could at the lack of reply. “Go ahead then, if you’ve the words.”

The alchemist stood up and left.

The complete dismissal almost sent Aiden into a murderous rage, he hadn’t been bound, the fools hadn’t bound his hands or brought out chains, he could – he should –

He didn’t. He gnashed his teeth harder and glared at the man’s back, trying to convince himself it was because the turncoat had no tongue and was just trying to pretend dignity.

A rumble louder than any heard before heralded the complete collapse of his throne room down on itself. Aiden watched in shock as the roof caved in, and the massive spume of dust, ash and smoke that burst up. Flashes of red light painted it from within, mixing like a blood moon’s glare with the billowing smog. They soon became a stream of fire that burst out of the cloud outright, streaming out as the beast climbed up through the falling structure.

Just as the scarred dragon – Sinestra? What kind of name – seemed to reach the end of its breath, a second stream of fire came from elsewhere to continue the assault on-

From within the fire, a tiny speck of gold shot out, arched its way like – borne by a strong wind that scattered the haze. The spark grew mid-air, to the full size of Hywel holding a green staff which he struck down.

The butt of the staff struck the head of the second she-dragon with the force of ten thunderstrikes, just as it came out of the ash devil.

CRACK-THOOM

Aiden flinched and covered his ears at the noise, it was so loud his eardrums hurt.

Through his squint, he saw that most others had done the same. Had he the presence of mind, he’d have tried to escape from the distracted killers, perhaps take Narett hostage-

The older, scarred dragon landed on the half-collapsed west wing. Hywel landed on the arched roof of the east wing, which was the only part of Aiden’s castle still intact. Lava drips and steaming black blood seeped from the scarred she-dragon’s jaws as she sought stable footing on the building she’d herself brken. Ysolde… Onyxia… Aiden’s wife was nowhere to be seen, but Aiden swore he could still hear-

“Finally down to your last tricks, boy?” The monstrous creature gurgled through her half-stitched mouth. The black blood seemed to be curdling into musky yarn growing in and out of her face, and her thrumming gut. “Whatever it is, it won’t matter!”

“I know,” Hywel’s voice somehow made itself heard as if he was just a few meters away, instead of a hundred. It was a bleak and resigned thing that made everyone dread. “There is no tragedy you won’t relish, no victory you won’t spoil. Whether or not we get our shit together, it’s almost never anyone’s fault but our own. But then something like this happens, when one of you lizards turns out to have been among us all along. So everyone blames you for everything, and nobody learns anything because no one can conceive of taking responsibility for themselves in your shadow.”

The dragon laughed madly, almost delightedly, then the floor exploded under Hywel’s feet. He was barely airborne when new flames enveloped him, from there and the older dragon both. Cries of dismay arose from those watching as the small, fading light was seemingly overwhelmed and buried in molten rock and dark fire by the two dark beasts that-

Everything flared golden, completely golden like it only had once before, that same morning. A spiral of words began to shine up through the ground. Suddenly, from that part of the Prophet that Aiden had hoped had disappeared from within him, came words.

“The Light unites the one who sees with the one who thinks, the one who feels with the one who does, but the unwise separates them, and thus he separates himself.”

Many columns of light erupted skywards from everywhere in sight, and inside the castle too, even as the dragons became more frenzied in their joint destruction.

“As the Light sees through your eyes, let it beat, breathe and flow with you, for it is eternal and without shadow, beyond beauty and ugliness, beyond good and evil, beyond life and death, beyond the flow of time.”

“The End,” the voice came from both inside and out then. “Is the Beginning!”

Aiden’s consciousness was obliterated with a blinding, wit-shattering shock as the fragment of foreign soul inside of him gave its last.

He woke up feeling like his chest, throat and skull had been raked inside out with sharp nails. He was on the ground. The ground that shook, but no longer with earthquakes. Instead, there were tromping feet, and bigger feet as great impacts came and went amidst roars and wing beats cut short by violence.

Pushing up, he saw through stinging eyes that people were outright running out through the forcefield as quickly as they could. Even as they left, more people ran, staggered or limped out of the farthest and smallest exits from the right wing of the castle, joining the evacuation that just barely stopped short of becoming a stampede. Only two of the four people in charge seemed to be in the same place, the Gilneans. Where-? How long had he been-?

Beyond them, the corpses were gone – no… No, Aiden recognized some of the faces among those making their last escape, they – he’d revived them. Hywel had brought them back – so many at once…

What kind of monster even was he? How could a mere man be able to-?

A wave of fiery death bathed the air above him, through which the bronze dragon he’d thought dead barrelled through despite the pain of peeling scales to bodyslam the – no scars, Onyxia? Ysolde?

Hot blood splattered Aiden’s face as he stared up at the grappling dragons that lost buoyance and crashed together into the belfry. The massive tower groaned dangerously as its base was cracked through.

Back at the keep, the bigger black dragon was in a teeth-clenched grapple with a red – a red dragon too? Another one? And then the two outside, Hywel’s – Aiden’s own assassin had been a dragon himself, before he betrayed him, and now the fifth – what other colours is he going to see before this is over?!

The dragons’ clinch broke along with the last shuddering dregs of the west wing’s second floor, sending the two rolling and thrashing furiously down into the courtyard where the bronze and corpses used to be, just as Hywel himself ushered the last survivors out of the East quarters.

Onyxia bashed the wobbly bronze over the head with part of the wall and spat steaming blood at him, but didn’t wait to watch it sizzle. She stumbled trying to fly, then snarled angrily and ran on the ground right where the Prophet was.

Hywel cursed, interposed himself between the last child and the dragon, and cast a weak shield as wide as he could, which was paltry indeed, it wouldn’t-

Mara Fordragon ran in just in the nick of time, and joined her Light to his. It was barely enough, and when Onyxia stopped to take another breath, Hywel vanished and appeared right between her jaws mid-swing.

Somehow, she spat him out before the staff struck the roof of her mouth. There was still a crack of thunder, but she took just the hit from the exploding air instead of potentially losing her brain.

“Go,” Hywel gasped at the woman when he landed again, and the fools who’d stopped to gape. “Get out while you still can!”

“What about y-“

“That’s my business!”

As if to make a liar of him, the other black dragon flew belly-up over the lot of them and crashed into Onyxia just as the latter tried to leap away. In her wake, the red dragon who’d thrown her jumped with aid from his wings and spat a wall of flames that were as golden as they were red. He then picked up the humans and leapt all the way to the gatehouse with another wing flap that only seemed to make the fire stronger.

“Beware that one!” The red dragon was the only part of the ensuing conversation loud enough for Aiden to hear where he was. “She took me by complete surprise, I neither saw nor sensed her, she’s done something so that I specifically can’t feel her weaves.”

Aiden wasn’t close enough to catch whatever argument started then, though he did use the wall to get there as stealthily as he could. As he did, the two blacks overwhelmed the fire wall with their own. Onyxia was slammed into the side by the returning, half-dead Bronze just as she made to leap forward. The bigger one had no one to stop her.

She leapt to attack the red, who met her half way. “No means no, Prophet!” The latter grunted even as his opponent snapped like a crazy beast at his face. “Besides, you’ve been wrong before! I’m not as important as you seem to think!”

“What do you-?” Hywel muttered just as Aiden drew close enough to hear. Then he snapped his fingers. “Tyranastrasz! He’s still alive.”

“I’ll not be led around by imperfect foresight!” The red lied so blatantly that Aiden could spot it a league away-

“But you’re not just – Dalaran-”

“Has dismissed me, thanks to you!” the dragon Krasus grunted as he wrestled the enemy aside. “Hurry, before we’re overwhelmed!”

An earth tremor threw Aiden to the ground and he lost the next part of the conversation. When he finally regained his bearings, Narett was running up from the gate, where the last stragglers had gone through. “That’s done!” So he did have his tongue again, curse that boy –! “We’re the only ones left, Wayland, where do you…?”

Risking a better look, Aiden peered over the overturned cart and saw the alchemist turn ashen.

“No,” Narett breathed, backing away from Hywel in horror to the confusion of everyone else. “You can’t mean-“

“Either this or they rouse Deathwing to break the world.” Hywel shifted grimly on his unsteady footing. Suddenly his tall, broad-shouldered body no longer obscured the headpiece of his staff. Even surrounded in floating blue and golden glyphs visibly shuddering against some mighty inner force, it shone so brightly that Aiden couldn’t look directly at it. “They cannot be allowed to live.”

Sinestra bit deep into Krasus forelimb and managed to push him nearly far enough to crush the humans. Most of them ran out of the way. Hywel swayed in place, pushed off the heel of the red one and proceeded to half-run, half-stumble back in the direction of the keep even as the battling dragons nearly crushed him to death in their frenzy.

“Wayland,” Narett called after but didn’t follow. “The force – you won’t – can’t hope to-!“

“Then I guess we’ll all see how beloved by the Light I really am!”

“You-“

That was when the bronze got done in a second time, and Onyxia swooped down upon the loiterers. Somehow, Krasus managed to wrestle his own opponent in her path to buy a few moments. It was all the last traitors could do to run out of the forcefield before Onyxia torched them all.

Aiden Perenolde stood there. Alone. Uncomprehending. Stunned.

Everyone seemed to have forgotten about him.

He…

He – they – he was the king, Hywel had come for him, the Light’s own Prophet, a literal Saint come down from heaven just to judge him, but now nobody…

Nobody cared about him.

The next while passed in a daze. He stared at where last four had left through the forcefield. He stared at the unknown dragon outside breaking the standoff and cutting into the path of the traitor-leaders to demand answers. He tried to stay out of the way of the dragons battling around him, only narrowly surviving because even Onyxia wasn’t paying attention to him anymore.

All she cared about was getting past the red dragon to kill Hywel, because unlike Aiden she seemed to understand what was going on. Something that scared her.

When the three monsters took their fight away and finally began to demolish even the east wing, Aiden ran to where the last of his court was huddled and tried to rally them. Shook them, called to them, screamed at them, pushed, slapped, anything and everything he could think of until the first stone flew.

They tried to stone him to death. A crying maiden tossed a rock at him, and it was like the gates of hell opened all at once, screaming blame and hatred at him as if he was to blame for every evil under the sun, called him – him a traitor – a dragon lover as if he’d called them here, ran him off screaming that he’d sold them out to monsters.

Aiden only survived because half of them were blind, and none of them had the will to get on their feet anymore. They stayed there, shellshocked or weeping, and didn’t follow as he ran.

He – what was – they just – what kind of people just gave up and went collectively mad? Was this the best Alterac could muster? What kind of creatures had his House been pandering to, that they acted like…?

He stared at the forcefield in front of him. He didn’t think to flee out for the gates when he ran from the mob, he didn’t think about anywhere, but here he was. He tried to reach through the forcefield and couldn’t, even though three literal assassins had passed through not long ago. Visions assaulted his mind, judging him, and he pulled away with a snarl.

“Even here at the end, it’s all just mind games!”

Seized by the spite of the condemned, Aiden Perenolde turned around and ran back into the keep. Fallen debris, upended earth and blocked passages barred his way, but none knew the castle better than him. He picked up what weapons he found along the way, from corpses and whatever display cases hadn’t been looted.

He thought he’d find Hywel in the throne room, but he didn’t. He wasn’t in the Council room either, or the receiving area.

Finally, he caught up with him in the corridor leading deep into the keep, towards where Aiden would have his private office if they were one floor higher.

His thrown knives missed. So did the axe. The wind itself turned the weapons aside. When Aiden drew close to try and stick him with a spear, steam scalded his hands so hot and sudden he dropped the shaft. The same happened with his mace, and his sword, and when he tried to use fists it was his face that got scalded, and he felt like he was cooking inside out when the hot vapors wend up his nose and down his throat into-

“No.”

The steam withdrew along with his breath.

“Don’t sully yourselves.”

Only rage kept him from losing consciousness. “You – think – you’re so superior! How many people just died so you-?”

“One thousand three hundred and eighty-eight.”

What?

“That includes the ones still shambling outside, they just don’t know it yet.”

What?

“Seven hundred and thirty-four nobles, three hundred and twenty-two servants and household guards, three hundred and thirty-two royal guardsmen.”

Those words – those numbers – that – that was a third of his royal guard, barely a tenth of his servants, but almost all of his noble court. Not even a hundred of his lords had made it out? If so many – he had to be lying – so many – his whole court!

“Power attracts, and it reveals,” Hywel sighed tightly as he shouldered open the door to the game room. “But you…” He – Hywel was panting for breath, he sounded exhausted, he was exhausted, tired, Aiden – he quickly got to his feet and followed him through the door, he still had a couple of knives- “At least nobody brought any children younger than twelve,” Hywel said as if that made him any less of a monster, such hubris!

Aiden jumped forward and stabbed him from behind.

The knife found flesh.

Aiden was shocked. He’d done it?

Aiden let go of the blade and backed away warily, but the Light’s retaliation didn’t come. Instead, blood began to spill around the wound, over the white cloth. It didn’t heal. It wasn’t healing, Hywel, he – he couldn’t heal himself anymore!

Fury and vindication came together in an unholy union, giving Aiden the strength to make his final strike.

His last knife exploded against a shield of Light.

The force of the detonation hurled him all the way across the room to slam into the wall next to the door he’d just come through. He crumpled to the ground, struggling to breathe, clutching at his wrist. His hand was gone all the way to the arm bone.

“That was for the thirty-two children that remain dead,” Hywel rasped. “But you only get one.”

The ceiling caved in suddenly, broken through by the maw of Onyxia leaking blood, bile, and a foul-smelling stench from her jaws as she opened her maw to-

The red dragon snapped his mouth down on her neck from behind and yanked her out just as she exhaled. The fire missed Hywel by less than a foot and set the entire right half of the room to burning.

Aiden struggled to look up through the smoke. The pain.

“Aiden Perenolde, feared by many, respected by few.” Finally, finally Wayland Hywel deigned to address him, only now at the end, though still he didn’t turn around, didn’t even face him while- “I tried, I really tried to find some other purpose to the way you rule, but I couldn’t. There’s nothing there with any other purpose than to humiliate.”

“Look at me when you’re talking to me, you-“ Aiden’s breath was ripped from him mid-word.

“Like this bravado just now, everything you do to your people, everything you tell them, everything you make them do, you do it all to lie. The less it reflects to reality the better. You inflict injustice. You force people to remain silent when they witness injustice. You force them to cheer when they’re being told the most obvious lies. You force them to participate in those lies, and every other sin under the sun that your cronies find taste for. All you do, everything is designed to make the people lose once and for all their sense of probity.”

The staff’s headpiece seemed to warp and twist the longer Aiden looked away from it, but the rest of it was the most solid and real thing in the entire room. The staff was made of some green metal, studded from top to bottom with white topaz gems. The one nearest to the floor was blue, though. Aiden didn’t know why, but it felt like the most meaningful sight he’d ever seen.

“I know why you do it. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. To assent to obvious lies, to co-operate with evil is to become evil yourself. One’s ability to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. From there, the only things left for power to attract are the corrupted. Bloated egos, petty grudges, vain cravings.”

The prophet reached up and unfastened the headpiece of his staff from the rest. Held it in one hand and just stared at it. “Have you ever seen an amputated spirit? A maimed one, even? A soul bleeding? And infant aborted mid-way through term? The world is a long-suffering thing, it can endure the likes of you forever. But I won’t.”

The Prophet held the light sphere up, and the thing – the glowing orrery – flew upwards through the newly opened hole in the ceiling.

“I’d have ended with you. The cancer is all ripped out now, I would rather just shoot you in the head and be done. But in a world like this, mankind's actions are never entirely our own, so the consequences of mine can't discriminate either.”

Aiden tracked the thing with his eyes. Higher and higher it ascended, above flames, above the dust and smoke that seemed to draw away from the wake of its passage. As it rose, the dome of Light outside seemed to grow ahead of its path, sharpen, rise in height like an ever-narrowing cone in the sky. On the outside, the traitor black dragon ran round and round and upwards in a spiral along its outer surface. Changing it. Shifting its shape.

“Wha-how-NO!” A desperate roar of denial came from the bronze just as the four battling dragons flew too high to fit. Onyxia shoved her head under his belly, pushed him over and kicked him through the golden dome all the way outside. “Curse youuuu-!“ The bronze howled weakly as he rolled and slid down the exterior of the light, clawing uselessly as he tried to arrest his fall. “You pus-gobbling tapeworm-!”

The cone grew taller, ever taller and narrower until the three battling dragons left couldn’t fly up through it even if they wanted.

The tip stayed just ahead the orrery’s ascent, until, finally, when the forcefield had grown so high that Aiden couldn’t guess the distance, it opened up to let new air in, and the sight of the distant blue sky.

Absolute hell broke outside as dragons both in and beyond the Light began a race towards the top, as if it would determine all their lives.

Why?

Surrounded by hellish flames and hallowed by the skylight above, the king could finally see the Prophet as he truly was. A walking dead in all but name. Weak. See-through, almost. Nearly hollow to his eyes. There was no part of him that didn’t look more solid than he did. Everywhere a wound should be, had been, gold shimmered and seeped out through his skin as if there were no flesh beneath anymore, just the Light replacing more and more until the man that used to be there was just memory. A mimicry of life but nothing real.

It was the most frightful thing the King of Alterac had ever seen. “What are you?”

“I am Ferdinand Wayland Hywel Rogasian, and I am here to impose my moral code.” The Prophet was enveloped in a globe of runes as his hand fell. “Be at peace.”

Life came to an end in a white flash.

Death took him with the terrifying feeling of falling, then being snared by mouths of slime. It pulled him down, dragged him, crushed him together with everyone else who’d died. Dozens, hundreds were snared and crushed together with him in a desperate pile of writhing limbs. He tried to claw his way past, through, up, somewhere.

But the souls around him recognized him, and like an unholy spell their wills joined together to push him under, down, down for them to step on, stomp and climb over in their bid to break free of hell while he – no, NO!

“No,” many voices came from all around, like a heavenly choir. “Not even for scum such as this.”

A wave of Light purged the dark tendrils, and all the souls flew free.

A different pull seized him then, looser, gentler but somehow even more impossible to defy. He couldn’t see what it was, the world was blinding brightness even as it faded. So bright that even the shapes of angels at distant points around the city could barely be made out.

There was nothing to hear either, except an echo that was so loud it had gone past sound into the realm of touch.

He could only feel himself floating, rising under a power not his own, pulled around in a spiral, a wide and winding spiral that narrowed with every revolution, each circuit taking him slightly more towards the sky.

Finally, like coming out of a snow bank, he could see the sky again. But instead of endless blue, there was a gray vortex swirling from horizon to horizon.

He felt like he shouldn’t be afraid, but he dreaded anyway. There was a river of souls around him, and all of them hated him. All of them hated him, and none of them were the one who murdered him.

In a bid to look for him, to see anything else but their scorn, he looked back down.

It…

That…

There were three dragon souls down there. Two were just faint drops of molten stone, rapidly hardening while the bulk of their shape was just bile-filled pus sinking into the hellish much that had almost swallowed him. A third was life and fire, but still too heavy to be drawn up into the vortex with the rest of them. It languished where it died. The others…

The Traitor Black crashed brokenly on the outskirts of Alterac City, barely avoiding killing everyone in the circus caravan as he dug a groove into the earth. The other dragon outside – a red – peeked up through her wings from where she had taken cover under the ridge just beyond. And the bronze…

The bronze was shooting like a meteor away towards the south, somehow still alive even after being blasted away by the barest edges of the – the…

As Aiden Perenolde was sucked into the vortex to the Otherworld, the last thing he saw was an enormous, sprawling white cloud that looked bizarrely like a mushroom cap.

Bylaws of Babel - Chapter 1

This one is still benefitting a bit from that i

Everything, Everywhere, One Thing at a Time - The Story so Far

So people don't need to go on other platform to look for this, I'm uploading a file with the story so far (Chapters 0-9). I've added some images that I put up in other places, to touch it up. No claim on those, except the last one. AI art isn't perfect, but it's not terrible either when you know a bit of photo editing yourself.

Understanding Does Not Presage Peace - Chapter 23

I expect either two or three more chapters after this one, and then we're done.

Thanks to everyone who supported me, and especially to those of you who are sticking around all the way to the end, even though the main plot is more or less played out now. This story would have remained unfinished without you.

The attached PDF version has the full Bingo Book entry, photo and all.

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Chapter 23: The Boustrophedonic Precipitate

“-. September 12, 8 ANB .-“

I woke up in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, to the sound of an unfamiliar voice chattering like a gatling cannon right next to my bed.

“-he just can’t understand how lucky he is that I didn’t – why I oughta – And that’s not even the worst part! Because of that whole stupid-head talk, I had a dream about running over the Kojiki Scrolls all over the village, nine years gone so low as half price – it was so dull too, the Nihon Shoki I mean – and somehow I still paid everything I had, it was a sale! I bought twelve percent under half price – they cost forty one yen each Kiki – all for twenty thousand and I put them into twenty-one cases for the Water Islands and sent a hawk – a hawk! Across the sea! It’s insane, even my dreams weren’t so crazy before I met him, you won’t mind if I give him a concussion, will you? The kyuubi will just heal it! Not that you could tell if he gets brain damage – AH!”

The little girl with rose eyes and even redder hair gasped loudly on finally realising I’d sat up in bed.

I took in her appearance, and the DNA data from shed hair and skin cells all over the place. “Who are you?”

“Uzumaki-sama!” The girl squealed and jumped off her chair to gush rhapsodically. “Such an honour, I’m so excited to meet you, I can’t even – welcome back to the land of the waking! Can I get you anything, food, drink – oh, water! Here’s some water, and anything you want just say the word and it will be done!”

I blinked and accepted the glass of water, which I drank in one long gulp. Then I drank another one while waiting for her to answer my question. It was all quite futile. “So?”

“Yes?” The eight-year-old girl asked eagerly.

Well isn’t that just cavity-worthy.

I decided not to react to her starry-eyed hands-clasped-under-her-chin most-devoted-of-all-fangirls pose. “You still haven’t given me your name.”

“Oh kami, you’re right!” In a flash, the little girl straightened and coughed into her fist before bowing in a much more pretend-I-didn’t-just-do-that fashion. “Of course, Lord Uzumaki! My name is Uzumaki Karin, junior nurse in training, at your service Lord Elder! I knew you’d wake up one day, our crimson hair is a mark of resilience, a symbol of the indomitable spirit of our clan! The whirlpool of fate may toss us, but we Uzumaki always rise to the surface!”

I diverted all my sanest reactions to secondary and tertiary mind threads while discreetly looking around for a panic button. Where did she memorize that from? Why? I suppose the Uzumaki must have had some philosophical traditions…

I knew things had gone sideways since I clocked out, you don’t loiter in the afterlife without someone visiting that died more recently than you, but even so… “Shouldn’t you be in Kusagakure?”

“Oh that’s old news, we moved here almost two years ago! Mom doesn’t talk to me about it, but I’m pretty sure Lord Fourth did something to spook the Kusakage into trading us off, we’re hardly the only Uzumaki the Death Slayer collected you know! You do know, right? You’re the one who told him about us, and the others, you must be! I asked Naruto and he went all shifty, he’s a terrible liar you know!”

Not even three minutes and I already want my comfort dragon. I looked down and found that my generic sickroom robe had an unusual attachment in the form of a white tie that shimmered slightly blue if you turn it the right angle in the light. Ah, good. Yemo wasn’t lying when he started spending all his sleeping time on the other side with me, he really didn’t get himself killed. I hadn’t really doubted him, but it was nice to get this last bit of confirmation that I didn’t abandon my newborn kid for the first two whole years of his life. We’d just – swapped spending his awake time together for the sleeping hours.

Even if he did all the work. If I still had him as a reason to worry about on this side, I’d have come back sooner.

Probably.

“Lord Uzumaki!” An older feminine voice preceded the appearance of a medic nin in her thirties, also a redhead and clearly related to the girl. “It’s a miracle!”

“Yes,” I said dryly at the sight of a woman who’d once been fated to die in prolonged, inhumane exploitation hundreds of miles away. Her sleeves were folded back but her arms had only the most faded bite marks. “A miracle indeed.”

The woman didn’t blush, but only because she used medical chakra on herself to control her reaction, I sensed it clearly.

My wife was laughing on the other side, I didn’t need to hear it to know it anymore. I ignored her. I was already here against my real wishes, I needed to find amusement on this side wherever I could. “I assume this place has a restroom, Miss...?”

“Oh pardon me, my name is Uzumaki Akari and I will be your doctor today. As for a restroom, certainly My Lord, I will show you. My daughter will get you some clothes ready in the meantime, won’t you Karin?”

“Okay mom!”

“Let me help you, sir, your muscle tone was preserved remarkably well but after so long abed you’ve surely… or perhaps not.”

I’d already tossed my sheets aside and stood up next to the bed. The hospital robe was the sort with an open back, unfortunately, but I couldn’t begrudge that. Even though I’d not, in fact, excreted anything because my biology doesn’t waste much of anything anymore.

I still changed it to a full-back one. Transmutation wasn’t the hardest application of charged particle manipulation, but it did require some solid multitasking. I wasn’t… all here yet, not even mostly here yet. I hadn’t even decided if I’d stay, I really didn’t want to after…

But I may as well test out my abilities, if I could be bothered to. Try to get a refresher on…

Well, everything.

By the time I finished cleaning myself up, I decided I was, indeed, in the best possible shape. The little ones, as always, did excellent work. I took a moment to focus only on them, to see if any – yes, there was, indeed, a surplus of anami spirits, and their unified proto-consciousness felt very ready to… expand their frame of reference.

Still didn’t want to leave me, though. They wanted… well, more me. Which made sense, a symbiotic life form will want more of the same life form it grew symbiotic with, and there was a notable lack of such.

I hadn’t decided if I was going to do anything to change that either. At least soon. Objectively speaking, it was probably the best idea going forward, but my motivation was still mostly all back in the afterlife.

Akari busied herself outside the door and updated me on what was clearly a heavily sanitised version of latest events.

I was in some fancy healing quarters with private bathroom directly attached. This was, it seems, a building created specifically for me. As she spoke, I spread Trito out invisibly, even more than it had been all this time in the anti-Kamui field I’d last left it in. Soon it engulfed the entire property, and a fair bit beyond.

What I saw on the ground above was what looked like a grocery store – no, it was a grocery store, even though the shopkeeper was an anbu and our own facility was underground. This was essentially a private clinic with facilities on par with the best Konoha had available, but created with earth and wood techniques so that it was completely sealed.

Seems I was something of a big deal, even two-years dead.

Effectively.

Turning my gaze outside, I saw something of the rest of what Akari was telling me. We were near what used to be the edge of Konoha, but the whole hidden village was bigger now. I had to extend Trito very far off to get a proper vantage, but there was a second wall some way out now.

Minato’s been busy.

And was keeping himself very busy in more ways than one.

This place had no doors or windows. The shop above did, it was a genuine shop, but this facility was effectively cut off from it and everything else. The only things linking it to the outside were the utilities, water piping and powerlines running through the ground from the shop down to this place.

It was probably the only reason they bothered to do it this way at all. The spot was probably chosen because it was easy to disguise as just another landline connection to the new city district. Otherwise, Minato probably would’ve stashed me in one of his many hideouts, seeing as distance was no issue for him and he… had just appeared in the other room just now. He was personally bringing people in and out?

Well don’t I feel flattered.

On a hunch, I aimed my Mind’s Eye of the Anchorite at Akari. Under the strong flavor of medical ninjutsu, her chakra had definitive doton undertones. She was probably able to open a way out with earth techniques then. Good.

Akari, of course, had fallen quiet upon the Hokage’s arrival.

I used a bit of wind manipulation to dry myself off, some biomanipulation to fix my beard and my hair, and some charged particle manipulation to turn the sick robe and a couple of towels into proper clothing. Let’s see, underwear came without saying, a shirt and pants I wouldn’t feel awkward being seen in public in. Let’s do a pair of nice sandals out of the straw hamper nearby, while I’m at it.

I exited the bathroom.

“Masanari-san,” Namikaze Minato said upon seeing me. He looked, sounded and felt genuinely glad to see me on my feet. “Welcome back.”

“Feel free to pretend I said ‘good to be back’ or whatever else you think will be believable to whoever you talk to.”

Minato’s face smoothed over with a thoughtful frown, then he sighed faintly. “I was afraid it would go something like this. With everything else, an ominous warning from beyond is more or less the one thing that hasn’t come to pass. You’re the messenger, I assume.”

“Not at all.”

The Fourth Hokage blinked. “Do I need to solve any riddles?”

“Hardly,” I smiled wryly. “Where do you think I’ve been this whole time?”

The younger man frowned in thought for a few seconds, then his expression lightened, and darkened again with the self-aware empathy of someone realizing there’s nothing they can do. “I see. This must be quite difficult for you then.”

“Umm.” Uzumaki Karin, as children often did, chose that moment to interrupt a heavy meaningful moment. “I guess you won’t be needing these clothes after all?”

Thankfully, the knee-jerk reaction of weary frustration with yet another child being foisted on me without my say so didn’t materialise. I had no problem experiencing feelings properly anymore, but…

Now that I could, none of them really measured up.

I was alive, healthy, surrounded by people who wanted to do as right by me as they could, who had done so for the entire time I’d been gone. I was even someone important enough for the Hokage himself to personally see to my safety and wellbeing. After, apparently, he’d taken the initiative to follow through on that journal I’d given Shisui way back. No strings attached either, from what I could see so far. All of that and I had only been awake ten minutes.

Ten minutes of everything going right but I still only felt sullen that I had to wake up at all.

Barely ten minutes and I already wanted to go back to sleep.

“-.  .-“

I’d woken up one and a half years into the Cold War.

Well, technically it was a real war. Obito’s neutralization didn’t halt everything he’d set in motion, and Akatsuki in particular was never his brainchild, just one of the things he co-opted. Like he had done to Water Country through Yagura’s brainwashing. Besides that, Cloud Village and especially Rock Village wasted no time launching infiltration attempts and probing strikes into Fire Country, when they found out that Konoha’s leadership had been decapitated.

Minato had considered a disinformation campaign, but ultimately decided that not enough would be gained from delaying the news of his return. Also, he needed people to not just believe it, but also that he was every bit as dangerous as ever. He decided shock and awe tactics would be most productive, so he just captured all the belligerents in the same hour and dropped them off back in their countries of origin in the same day. Very publicly.

In line with his expectations, the entire world completely lost their minds when they found out the Yellow Flash was, indeed, back among the living. Contrary to his hopes, however, his return only galvanised Earth and Lightning countries to war. Apparently, his mercy in not killing the infiltrators was misinterpreted as weakness, so they wanted to capitalize on the time window left open by the chaos in Konoha ‘before the Yellow Flash recovered his full strength.’

It was also discovered, sometime later, that there had been a powerful rumour going around too, about what really happened to the Uzumaki. Worse, that Minato now knew and was out for revenge, so peace was impossible regardless. The Konoha intelligence divisions were certain that rumour had not proliferated organically.

Because shinobi are all liars, the other villages painted Minato’s counter-intelligence action as a war declaration. Lightning promptly tried to renew its alliance with Water, which didn’t work because the Hidden mist Village was in the middle of a coup d’etat – Yagura had been assassinated by ‘someone’ while he was unconscious after Minato neutralized him, and now it was a power struggle between one Momochi Zabuza and everyone else.

Lightning’s overtures to Earth proved more successful, Hidden Stone had already moved in to establish a clandestine base of operations in Rain Country. They even managed to launch a massed attack into Fire Country that allowed the Raikage A, with B’s help, to penetrate all the way to the ‘Thousand-Armed Enlightened Buddha Statue of Firefly Forest’ that I had left behind during my failed enlightenment bid. Everyone was sure, apparently, that it was involved in Minato’s resurrection and potentially the one thing keeping him alive.

Minato responded to this by coming to the statue’s defense as if that was true. He completely thrashed the both of them at the same time, cut all of A’s tendons beyond what medical jutsu could heal, altered B’s Iron Armour Seal so that he couldn’t synchronise with Gyuki anymore, and dumped them both off in A’s office back in Kumogakure in a single yellow flash, proving that he’d somehow gotten in there at some point to tag the place. The rest of the invading forces suffered similar fates, except they were instead dumped in ones and twos in the waiting rooms of hospitals all over Lightning Country’s towns and cities.

This was set to make the whole world explode, unfortunately, even after the Fire daimyo sued for peace. The Raikage was too proud and offended to back down, calling Minato a soft weakling for not finishing the job even as he tore down his own headquarters in order to build a non-hiraishined replacement. Meanwhile, Stone had just too much hate of the Yellow Flash for Third Tsuchikage Onoki to control even if he wanted to.

Minato once again decided to pre-empt escalation on his own terms. He even had all his ammunition already handed to him by his enemies. And me. He published my ‘findings’ about the fate of Uzumaki clan remnants, used mokuton to expand Konoha by around fifty percent surface area, and proceeded to visit all his allies and invade every single enemy country all by himself.

Thereupon he persuaded, negotiated, intimidated, coerced, and even killed whoever got in his way. Within the span of just three weeks, every single redheaded person in the known world that hadn’t chosen of their own free will to stay where they were had been collected in Konoha. Even Juugo’s clan, because Minato decided better safe than sorry and took all the orange-haired people too.

All the while, he continued to cripple literally every ninja he personally engaged from the other belligerents. He very deliberately continued to refrain from killing any of them in order to stall the Cycle of Hatred, but nonetheless rendered them incapable of taking the field even with medical ninjutsu help. He equally pointedly made sure to neutralize the other kage in their command tents – or in the case of Kusagakure in his own office – just so everyone got the full message.

Thus it was that, to the shocked dismay of everyone not from Fire Country, hostilities fizzled out one month into Namikaze Minato taking the field.

It escaped no one that he could have achieved the same result by killing everyone who did him wrong on the first day. And that he still could.

Namikaze Minato had not started the hostilities, but he was ready to terminally end them at any moment he liked. He had the entire world at his mercy, and everyone knew it.

Finally, finally it was looking like the daimyos of Lightning and Stone countries were going to disclaim the whole mess as a complete misunderstanding, or ninja acting beyond their authority. Some of the nobility even had very personal reasons to desire peace – a number of them, and even a couple daimyo, had been using Uzumaki as broodmares and concubines, not just their shinobi. There was even serious talk about forcing the Raikage to step down, after all he had nothing going for him except combat ability, which he’d now lost. Anything to restore the status quo.

That was when the joint operation that Stone and Lightning had set up in Rain’s territory was eradicated in one night. It was an attack carried out by merely three people, a picture of whom was taken by one of just two survivors. A man the attackers deliberately let flee to spread the word.

The other survivor had been Onoki of Both Scales, the Tsuchikage himself, who’d retreated from the site of battle and soon after the whole country of Rain.

The Fourth Shinobi World War had since turned into a slog between Stone and Lightning on one side – along with their various satellite countries – and Amegakure on the other. The latter currently held a narrow upper hand, despite being a single ninja village from the poorest buffer state on the continent.

I examined the photo. Yahiko’s corpse looked broadly like I remembered from my prior life, vague as the resemblance was to that hand-drawn Japanese art style. However, he wasn’t flanked by anyone even vaguely resembling the Preta and Human paths I recalled. Instead, he was accompanied by a blonde woman studded from toe to head in Nagato’s black chakra receivers, and a bearded red-haired man who wore an odd three-pronged hat and didn’t have any of the receivers.

While everyone was distracted by Minato, Nagato had gone all the way into Lightning and Stone countries and taken their jinchuriki. Only one of whom resisted.

I paged through the summaries that Minato had freely given me when we arrived at his office, after a very public and visible walk across town. I found that Han, the host of Kokuo the Five-Tailed Giant Horse, was the only other jinchuriki unaccounted for. Fu, at least, was still in Takigakure, likely because Tea Country was an ally of Fire so everyone knew Minato would take exception to her abduction. So, Flying Beetle Lucky Seven Chōmei was still safe at least.

Some pictures of some of the Akatsuki existed too. I only recognized Sasori and Kakuzu though. No photos of Konan, but that made sense if she was still playing Angel in Amegakure, and Nagato clearly wanted to make a point.

I set the files aside and returned to the photo of the Ame debacle.

Yugitoo Nii. Kumogakure’s jinchuriki of Matatabi, the Two-Tailed Blazing Monster Cat. Unwilling.

Roshi. Iwagakure’s jinchuuriki of Son Goku, the Four-Tailed Giant Rockfire Ape. Willing.

“Best as we’ve been able to figure out, Roshi was most incensed by your findings about his origins, not because of the shocking nature of the information, but because he’d reached similar conclusions in the past only to be persuaded otherwise by the Tsuchikage,” Minato told me when I looked up from the photograph. “He was always on very poor terms with the Tsuchikage, his so-called meditative retreat was actually borderline sedition even before then. In light of that, and the fact he was always as stubborn as Onoki himself, he began to wonder how he’d let himself be persuaded at all.”

“So he had an epiphany,” I scratched my beard. “Or a breakdown.”

“We’re unsure. It was some manner of revelation, but that’s as much as we can categorically confirm. We suspect some manner of mind alteration jutsu in play before then, likely not cast by Onoki at all. Either Roshi finally communed with Son Goku enough for the bijuu to end whatever technique it was, or Pain did something when he found him.”

Obito wasn’t planting his mind spiders just in Water, which made sense. Why only use a tool once, if it was so effective? “Or before then,” I mused. “Akatsuki have been playing mercenary, right?”

“You believe Stone hired them at some point, leaving Pain with sufficient familiarity with their lands and operations to infiltrate with impunity,” Minato nodded. “I have some suspicions of similar bent, but have decided not to pursue them. Any records of such will have been eliminated by now, and at this point it no longer matters.”

I dropped the photo back on Minato’s desk. “What’s this about my statue?”

“Still where you left it. The daimyo intends to build a new tourist town around it, though I’ve been having some success warming him to the idea of granting the land to the Uzumaki instead. Now that you’re awake, you can work your particular brand of charm on him if you like.”

I shook my head. “No, dealing with all the Uzumaki remnants is going to be uncomfortable enough.”

“How so?”

“I was in the afterlife long enough for someone to visit that knew why we were banished.”

Minato’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You were banished? Your family, you mean? That’ll be quite the story, I bet.”

“Not much of one actually.” I grimaced. “Suffice to say, great-grandpa stole another clansman’s would-be wife. She wasn’t entirely unwilling, which is why she was banished with him, though he was the only one whose chakra system was sealed as punishment. Either way, it’s not an auspicious history. Certainly not one that gives me any claim to the clan.”

“Your candor never fails to amaze, Hanzo,” Minato said with a wondering smile. “You won’t be able to persuade anyone that you don’t deserve a pardon, at this point. I hope you realize that.”

“I’ll not say no to one, but being accepted back and being put in charge are two different things.”

“Well, I’m afraid you might have woken up a bit too late to fight either matter.” Minato got up, walked to a cabinet near the wall and pulled a drawer open, from whence he drew a booklet. Returning to his desk, he held it out for me to take.

I did.

It was the Hidden Cloud bingo book.

My heart sank.

“Stone have an entry as well, with similar information.” Minato ‘helpfully’ supplied, because Naruto had to get it from someone and it sure as hell wasn’t me. “The bookmark should already be at the right page.”

============================

Hattori Hanzo (S)

T: ?B+(S)       G: S         N: S

Int: S       Str: B+(S)       Stm: S     Spd: B+(S)

Known Aliases: Masanari Hanzo, Makul Finnu

Born: January 2, 780

Family: Wife (deceased), son (deceased), daughter (deceased)

Affiliations:

·       Konohagakure – Civilian (?), Hokage Advisor (secret, informal, ?), all-around VIP

·       Fire Country – Living National Treasure (Secret?), Businessman (Aspiring ?), Nobility (Pending ?)

·       Uzumaki Clan – Elder, Clan Head

·       Salamander Hanzo of Amegakure – unknown (blood relation has not been categorically disproven)

Titles: Exalted Loremaster, Master of Samsara, Sage of Spirits

Bloodline Limit: Uzumaki Vitality, Uzumaki Adamantine Sealing Chains, unspecified Biomanipulation bloodline (instant regeneration from fatal wounds demonstrated alongside flesh shedding for the purposes of evasion and escape, at will), Mokuton (Senju connection?)

Abilities:

·       Taijutsu (Body Techniques) – B+ (S with Celestial Gates)

·       Genjutsu (Illusory Arts) – unknown (none demonstrated, S-rank resistance displayed)

·       Ninjutsu (Ninja Arts)

o   Katon (Fire Release) – unknown

o   Doton (Earth Release) – unknown

o   Fuuton (Wind Release) – unknown

o   Suiton (Water Release) – unknown

o   Raiton (Lightning Release) – S

o   Mokuton (Wood Release) – S (at least one Hashirama-level feat demonstrated)

o   Inton (Yin Release) – assume S (see Other)

o   Yoton (Yang Release) – assume S (see Other)

o   Onmyōton (Yin-Yang Release) – assume S (see Other)

o   Other – Kami Manifestation (?): individual is known to have invoked a giant four-armed guardian spirit on at least one occasion, capable of both offense and defense on par with the best jutsu of the Konoha elite, as well as channelling his unique abilities through himself and others. Explicitly not a summoning technique.

·       Strength: B+ (S with Celestial Gates)

·       Stamina: S (all combat feats listed in this profile occurred on the same day)

·       Speed: B+ (S with Celestial Gates)

·       Sensor Skills: unknown (assume B-rank or better, possibly S-rank based on past Uzumaki feats)

·       Subterfuge – S (was able to pass as a completely powerless and unremarkable civilian while training S-rank skills and building influence to the highest levels in Fire Country and Konoha for decades)

·       Intellect – S (known feats indicate genius mind impossible to assess reliably)

Notable Feats:

·       Invented a chakra-independent autonomous vehicle

·       Invented a heavier-than-air flying craft

·       Invented remote-controlled versions of both of the above

·       Invented chakra-independent weapons capable of firing c-rank projectile technique equivalents

·       Invented mathematical methods capable of predicting the future

·       Rediscovered lost Uzumaki secret techniques (specifics unknown)

·       Masterminded the Uzumaki Clan Second Founding

·       Alongside the Hyuuga and Uchiha Clan Chiefs, managed to survive the same decapitation strike that succeeded against the Third Hokage (nominally)

·       Exhibited ability to open the Eight Celestial Gates at will

·       Killed Orochimaru of the Sannin single-handedly

·       Created the Thousand-Armed Enlightened Buddha Statue of Firefly Forest (purpose still unknown, presumed involvement in Yellow Flash resurrection)

·       Brought the Yellow Flash back to life (method still unknown)

·       Replicability of all the above assumed

Noteworthy allies and connections:

·       Uchiha Shisui of the Body Flicker – Friendship, Paternal relationship (?)

·       Uchiha Clan – benefactor, blood-sworn allies

·       Third Hokage Sarutobi Hiruzen – secret (?) sponsor, patron (?) (turnaround in Third Hokage late-term governance attributed at least in part to subject)

·       Fourth Hokage Namikaze Minato (Yellow Flash) – honor-bound patron, sworn ally, distant family relation by marriage through Fourth Hokage’s wife, Uzumaki Kushina the Red Hot-Blooded Habanero, possible direct blood kin (grandparents were contemporaries with Senju Hashirama and Uzumaki Mito, Mokuton source?)

·       Konoha Jonin Commander Nara Shikaku – co-conspirator

·       Head of the Hyuuga Clan Hyuuga Hiashi – apparent social rival, blood debt (subject saved life of heiress during aforementioned decapitation strike)

Psychological profile: Subject is known to exhibit a dry, fatalistic self-deprecation in general interaction, but veers into condescension and outright contempt when challenged in his areas of expertise. Conversely, subject was never part of any armed forces and never had formal shinobi training. Reported non-militant. Potential pacifist. Feats of prowess, though notable, are outnumbered by the rest, and they all took place in either self-defense or defense of allies. Subject to date has never initiated combat. Has chosen to pursue de-escalation in all known confrontations, only resorting to violence when all attempted overtures for peace had failed. NOTE: This assessment may be completely erroneous in the face of the rest of the data, which suggests instead that this is all just a front for a tricksome, manipulative, highly devious character underneath the underneath. Irreverence towards everything and everyone up to the Hokage themselves is apparently norm, not exception. Given connections now known, subject’s public persona, and possibly entire history may be (and likely is) entirely fabricated.

Threat Level: Extreme. In the abstract, potentially catastrophic – subject may be capable of empowering others in ways similar to himself, and his inventions promise to shatter the current world order.

Bounty: Unlisted

Standing Policy: Do Not Engage

============================

That’s not how you say Finn MacCool, I thought blankly as I stared at my Bingo Book entry. Every possible emotion was fully experienced at the same time, then in a line and all together through a myriad of parallel mind threads, even as the greater part of my brain processed the implications the same way.

When I was done reasoning through all the information and its possible sources, assuming that it wasn’t Konoha itself that leaked any of this… There was only one person not from Konoha who knew about everything in that list, especially that I might be able to permanently empower others.  “Orochimaru’s alive.”

“Most probably.”

As I’d feared, Orochimaru must already have had phylactery seals on backup patsies. Also, at least one person in his employ would have been entrusted with – and capable of using – the revival function in them. Was Kabuto in his employ already? Possibly among the ROOT agents too, the ones who tried to frame Akatsuki for the attack and attempted kidnappings.

Shikaku told me back then that at least a couple of them had escaped. But it was still early in the timeline… “This might be a reach, but during whatever you did with ROOT, did you find out anything about one Yakushi Nono?”

Minato frowned in though. “I cannot recall the name off hand. Why?”

“Danzo and Orochimaru were playing a really fucked up psychological experiment on her, regularly delivering her fake photos about her de facto son Kabuto growing up, so she wouldn’t recognize him when they met again. From what I know, they planned to send the kid to kill her after her long-term infiltration in Earth country ran its course.”

Minato looked at me narrowly. “Something you got from Orochimaru during your harrowing suicide ploy?”

I gave Minato an equally earnest smile. “Sure, let’s go with that.”

A puff of smoke produced a shadow clone that promptly teleported away. “My clone will look into that. If nothing else, she should be extracted at least, if she is still alive.”

I re-read my Bingo Book entry with very mixed feelings, some of it irony and none of it fear. “I was wondering when this would happen,” I huffed finally. “Hattori Hanzo indeed.”

I had expected this to happen only for the last few months before my coma, but even before then the irony of my name hadn’t been lost on me. ‘Masanari’ was the real name of Hattori Hanzo back on Earth too, during my first life. Though for him it was his first name, not the surname. Also, Hattori Hanzo was literally known as the Second Hanzo.

If I ever let someone make a story of my life, this will probably be the most blatant non-reveal ever written. I can’t imagine that anyone will fail to instantly make the connection the first time they see my name written down on page.

It looks like I’m being ennobled too, soon, I thought wryly. That’s the only thing left before I can declare myself a samurai, then the parallels will be complete. Might have to wage a war too, if the Land of Iron takes offense. Very in theme.

“Does this mean my research is out there now? I know Hiashi retrieved the stuff Orochimaru stole, but I don’t know what happened with it after that.”

“No.”

I looked up from the book in surprise. “I’m pretty sure at least some of that stuff is written in a language you or Naruto can understand. And I know the Third kept tabs on all the stuff I’ve done since my thesis, especially the things Shisui was there for. You’re telling me none of that was leaked?”

“Not of that was allowed to be leaked. By me.” Minato beheld me seriously. “I am not Hiruzen, I am not you, and you were not dead. When I became Hokage, I had no greater vision than protecting Konoha. But you clearly do. Now that you are back among us, I am ready to cast my bet.”

Well damn. I – no, no bones about it. “I am very touched to hear that.”

Minato nodded graciously. “I did, however, take the liberty of letting the Daimyo know of your business aspirations. Now that you have recovered, I can update his Majesty and you two can schedule a meeting and discuss the particulars at leisure.”

… Go me for bypassing the bureaucracy without even trying? “Maybe later.” I cleared my throat. “So. There aren’t attack helicopters flying all over the place then?” Admittedly, the internal combustion engine wasn’t entirely straightforward to adapt. Neither it nor the capacitor and battery technology I’d played with was laid down on paper either. Not in a readable language anyway.

No doubt someone would have figured something of them out, if given free reign, and especially with Naruto’s help and whatever Minato got from me during our Ninshu back then. Doubly so if they took apart Sasuke’s toys.

But then, those would be clan property now, wouldn’t they?

I sat back, closed my eyes and combined the awareness of senriki with the Third Eye of the Anchorite to scan the entire village. There was… amazingly little tension to be found, considering we were technically in a state of world war. Since my combination of sensory powers let me even distinguish shapes and bodily motions, I could even identify people I’d never been in the presence of before, based on images and deductive reasoning.

I didn’t find Jiariya, but traces of chakra with toad-like flavor were recent enough around the hot springs that I could trace his exit from the village, and even tell it had only happened yesterday. A powerful Yin-flavored chakra that could only be Senju Tsunade was in one of the new hospitals in the new outer district, either tending to or examining one of Juugo’s kinsmen.

Almost on the opposite end of the village, Sarutobi Hiruzen was practicing calligraphy alone in a room, though there was a man keeping vigil in seiza in an adjacent room, playing shogi on his own with a single thin straw paper wall between them. By the shape of him and their similar chakras, it was probably Asuma. To rooms farther off, a woman was entertaining a toddler. Also close to the others in terms of energy nature, more so than the rest of the Sarutobi clan around the place. Konohamaru and his mother then.

The Uchiha clan was no longer in the old compound. Instead, it was in the process of relocating to the inner ring of the village, where the police section and prison had once been. It was more space, and solved the last of their optics problem in one fell swoop. Itachi was talking to the foreman. Shisui… He was in the forest by a river, practicing kunai and shuriken throwing blind.

Looking outward, I had to scan the underground – already a tall task – and couldn’t see more than a meter into the new facility I found. It had been built where Danzo’s ROOT base had once been. That would be the new prison then, and Minato had clearly come up with new security measures if even I couldn’t see trough them lightly. I did have more options than this, but they were hardly necessary.

Finally, after another full scan of the village, I was able to locate my toads. Absentmindedly stroking the shapeshifted form of Yemo hanging from my neck, I gave my now huge creations a thorough once over. They were in the Forest of Death, living in a large but very heavily defended site with all the essentials. By the traces of energy all over the place, I could tell that Jiraiya had summoned someone there recently, and that Naruto dropped by at least once a day to take care of them. I love that boy.

My house was intact, with most everything where I’d left it. Freshly dusted too. Chakra traces suggested that Shisui had taken it upon himself to keep it right as I’d left it. Whether my notebooks and scrolls were still there, that I’d have to check in person. Probably not. Minato had already told me that they carried out my ANBU pass contingency, so my research had probably been moved somewhere safe.

Good. Better safe than too stupid live.

Hatake Kakashi was among the ANBU hidden around the room, and there was a couple more outside the tower. I did, of course, know where everyone was.

“There’s just one thing I still don’t get,” I said when I finally opened my eyes again.

“That being?”

I held the bingo book open at my entry for him to see. “What the heck is up with this picture? I’m absolutely positive that I never looked this good in my life.”

“That was Shikaku’s contribution to my retaliation on your behalf,” Minato said wryly. “Since Cloud insisted on trying to ruin your future, I decided to be petty while collecting your scattered clansmen. I spent my off-time sneaking into printing presses and changing as many trays as I could find with ours.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“It was Naruto’s idea,” Minato waved me off as if that excused anything. “I would have gone after the leaks, or just stolen or sabotaged production of the Bingo Book until they gave up. But they managed to get the information out to too many people before we finally found all the facilities, and they could always produce some by hand just to spite us. This demon is well and truly free of its seal, I’m afraid.”

“So this is a photo of Shikaku under the transformation technique?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Is he a genius artist too, or something?”

Well, since the bunny’s already loose…

I decided to re-groom myself right then, adjusting my hair and my beard to the right length and gloss, and transmuted my clothing too, to reflect the picture. I had to play a bit with the tone and lustre of my skin, which took longer than I thought it would. Even though I didn’t need to change any of my bone structure, it took me over a minute to get everything right, even with all my advantages. “How’s that?"

“A vast improvement to Naruto’s ‘Uncle Hanzo in the lab’ transformations.”

“Oh yeah, those are probably a right fright to look upon.”

Minato shrugged. “I personally don’t see it, but I’ve been told by reliable sources that my tastes for aesthetics can be out of tune with the rest of humanity.”

If they weren’t you wouldn’t be the Messiah.

Well, the prototype, anyway.

Or maybe not? Minato was a much better fit than Naruto for Gamamaru’s prophecy. Naruto had to earn the destiny his father abandoned when the latter chose – foolishly, in my opinion – to use the Death Demon Consuming Seal. You know, instead of just letting Kushina seal the Kyuubi back inside herself and be the only one who died along with it, like she’d wanted.

Ah, but I don’t have a very good opinion of prophecy to begin with. The world would be a much better place – and the other realms too – if the toads and everyone who went along with them had gotten off their asses, instead of settling down to wait for a thousand years for Gamamaru’s vision to happen. Waiting for a future saviour is just an excuse not to do anything to make things better now.

Of course, Minato’s insistence on dying unnecessarily was foolish regardless.

But I was sure I didn’t need to have that talk with him at this point. He’d seen for himself the result of his ‘sacrifice.’

Speaking of sacrifices.

The bouncing human missile that had been all but cannonballing in our direction since the moment he got out of the Shinobi Academy finally barrelled through the thankfully open window.

“UNCLE!” Hollered one Namikaze Naruto. “YOU’RE ALIVE!”

“OOOF!” I grunted as the kid literally slammed into my chest so hard I toppled backwards along with my chair.

CRASH

The chair broke under me because I was heavy as hell and didn’t bother negating my own mass in the presence of friends, don’t you know.

“You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive, I’m so happy! I knew you’d be back, you never give up, you always win, I knew it! I-I’b so habby!” Naruto burst into hiccupping tears, which he promptly swallowed along with his snot. “Nob! I’b not gonna gry!” Trying again, he-

He somehow managed to actually do it, incredible.

“I’m not gonna cry! I’m not a baby, I’m a ninja! Dad tell him, Uncle you gotta believe me, believe it! Don’t listen to that stupid-head Karin, I don’t care what she says, she doesn’t know anything and she makes stuff up all the time and she lies! She just came to the Academy to brag about playing nurse for you! She still expects me to believe her that she gets to take care of you when I only get to visit once a week! Like I’ll believe that! Tell him Dad!”

Minato rubbed the side of his nose with self-consciousness so fake that it completely flew over Naruto’s head. “I told you, Naruto, as Hokage I cannot afford to comment on what measures may or may not be in place to secure the Uzumaki Clan Head’s life and wellbeing.”

“But that’s so dumb!” Naruto complained, sagging like a pile of flubber on top of my chest where I lay on the ground. “If that’s true, why haven’t you locked Karin up for lying about it? When I become Hokage that’s the first thing I’ll do!”

Because misinformation? Maybe? I thought vaguely as I sat up. I held Naruto close to me with all the full-heartedness I’d not been able to feel for anyone since my wife and kids died. Finally, I was once again a fully functional human being.

Even though I still wasn’t all on this side yet. Not even mostly.

“What took you so long anyway?!” Naruto demanded when I crossed my legs under me and he finally had something to stand on that put his face level with mine. He hopped up and pointed accusingly. “You just went to sleep and didn’t wake up! For two years! It’s crazy, how could you, Uncle?”

I smiled sadly. “No one wants to come back from Heaven, Naruto.”

“Whu – you were in HEAVEN?!” Naruto immediately turned starry-eyed. “That-that’s awesome! What was it like?! you have to tell me – no wait! No! No, that’s not gonna work, not this time, I’m onto you now! You can’t distract me from being upset with you anymore! You abandoned me! And-and-AHA!” He pointed at my shimmering tie then, even more accusingly. “See, even the magic tie agrees with me, why else would it be so clingy and not come out to trip me or something? It always does something when I say something bad about you! Even it knows I’m right!”

Magic tie? What-?

A ninshu nudge from my ‘magic tie’ let me know through that somehow, I didn’t know how, Naruto had still never seen my ‘magic tie’ be anything but a magic, ‘occasionally-a-button-but-usually-just-a-cool-tie thing’ that sometimes moves randomly when he’s not looking. Worse, everyone else seemed determined to play into this running gag.

I looked at the blond man across the desk. “You are a cruel man indeed, Namikaze Minato.”

I was entirely serious. It was a bit too much to pull this trick on Naruto on top of everything else. Alongside the preferential treatment afforded to Karin and her mother. Which, alright, that was clearly down to their special chakra, special duties were only given to them in case I had to bite them and recover from fatal injuries, if security on me failed.

But it was still one step too far. Sure Naruto was a loudmouth, but the mobile security on him was hardly inferior to the static one on mine, wasn’t it?

Oh well. Maybe Naruto had dome something to earn this as a long-term lesson while I was comatose, he’s certainly the type-

“See, see Dad, Uncle totally agrees with me, I told you he would!” Uzumaki Naruto triumphantly misunderstood everything. “This is why I like the Old Man More than you!” He lied. “I mean sure, he’s crazy now, but Uncle can just heal him now that he’s back! You’ll do it, right Uncle? Just like Shisui-san! You already got to him, right? I know he still plays bodyguard no matter what anyone else says, even though he’s going blind and his chakra’s all wonky now too. He’s not as bad as Scarecrow, and he still gets to be in ANBU! I know! We’ll go do it all right now! We can, right? Let’s go!”

… Eh?

Everything, Everywhere One Thing at a Time - Chapter 9

The long-awaited beginning of the second book,

The Unified Theorem - Chapter 19

Part 2 of the volume climax, next chapter will conclude the show of shit.

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Chapter 19 – The Fickle Turns of Subterfuge

“-. Aiden Perenolde, King of Alterac .-“

He was blinded but could see. He was deafened but could hear. The Light had sought to rob him of even his wits, but that didn’t work either. Unlike all the others he’d since stepped over, it didn’t work. Not yet. He wasn’t as weak as the rest, and all the pieces of the Alterac Regalia that he wore had activated to sustain his body and spirit in his hour of greatest need.

How ironic, then, that it got harder and harder to push down the wish to find relief in oblivion. Not that the boy-prophet would let him. Not for the next day. One day. One day where he wasn’t deaf to his life collapsing around him, one day of being unable to escape everyone else’s gaze, one day when he was no longer the judge but the condemned!

He had one day before he was rendered an insensate cripple, because the royal artefacts would either burn out or stop working at the absence of a threat. That boy. That piece of him. That boy was in his head. In him! How did the artefacts not prevent it from happening? It was an even bigger violation than the smite! 

“All that holier than thou posturing!” growled Aiden Perenolde as he finally put his knife through the eye slit of his last bodyguard. He didn’t know where the prophet was and he didn’t care if he was heard or not. It wouldn’t make a difference with him literally inside his head now, he was sure of it! “Yet here at the end, you just aim for the same thing: to control everything! To make everyone else think the same way you do – no, the way you want them to think! Us! Me!”

Aiden had tried to act decisively after the spell, despite feeling like his body and soul had been slashed bloody, but then he crossed eyes with his guards and everything went to hell. At first they couldn’t decide if Aiden should be killed or seized, whether for ransom or trade with the prophet. Then they began to see straight through each other too, and suddenly they were killing one another in sudden personal vendettas.

Aiden only survived unscathed because two of his men actually stayed loyal.

Then they crossed paths with Valea Twinblades, and he didn’t survive unscathed anymore. Somehow, he didn’t know how, she’d gathered a whole corridor’s worth of people to her side in just the last ten or twenty minutes. Some wavered at the sight of him, only to lose all hesitation after he first avoided, then failed to avoid meeting their gaze. It was galling to look away and down like he was guilty of something, and it was no use in the end. A child got him. The Blackmoore boy. A boy that had the nerve to hold him at fault for executing his traitor father!

One of his last bodyguards stayed behind to buy time with his death, and it was just Aiden’s luck that the last one decided to have a change of heart at the worst time!

The jest was on the prophet this time, though. It was his gifted insight that warned Aiden of the incoming treachery.

In pain from cuts and many more bruises, and frantic to get a moment’s peace even if just to reassess things, Aiden fled from where his last bodyguard had tried to kill him, down secret passages only he should know.

Unfortunately, he had to double back and turn down the servant corridor when he found the last stretch caved in. Almost no dead or blind simpletons by those ways, and no children at all, which the boy-prophet would probably expect him to find meaningful.

He reached the stairway around the west-most load-bearing turret, only to hear footsteps and voices coming from above.

Shamefully, he ended up hiding in the privy. Stayed as quiet as he could while… whoever they were passed. The Gilneas party? He thought he heard-

A whimper startled him. From behind. Turning with a white-knuckled grip around his dagger, he belatedly noticed the privy was not unoccupied. One of his brownnosing weasels had had the same idea as him. When their eyes met, it was the first time that day that Aiden didn’t come out the worse from the shared double vision.

Aiden could only stand and stare at the tattered, dirty creature frozen before him. For a moment, he couldn’t fathom how the two of them could be part of the same race. The creature was opening its mouth-

He stabbed it through the throat before it could give away their presence. He covered its nose and mouth while it thrashed in death. When it subsided, he stepped back and blankly watched it slump dead on the latrine.

He stood there even after… whoever was outside passed out of hearing. Then longer, while screams, rumblings and the vague shapes and spirit lights skimmed along the edges of his vision all over the castle. Aiden stood stock-still until the ever-present stench of human waste changed enough to let him know the man-shaped thing infesting his privy room had soiled itself in death.

He stepped back out of the privy and quickly went up the way the others had come from. Once on the third floor of Alterac Keep, he rushed for the secret escape tunnel through the mountain. To his dismay, the last stretch of corridor had been collapsed by some alchemical charge. Worse, the more he dug, the more gold shone through the rubble. If he’d kept running, he’d have died in the rubble. If he kept digging, he’d just be at another dead end.

“You won’t settle for blood, will you?” Aiden muttered as he sucked at his bleeding fingers. “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve destroyed everything I’ve built.”

Was this why no hidden blade had found him yet? He thought one of the assassins or even Ravenholdt himself should have come jumping out of the shadows by now. Was that just because the boy wanted him to suffer?

Paranoid, Aiden took some sand from the debris and tossed it around, along with small pebbles, but no invisible interlopers were revealed. He filled his pockets with some more and set off randomly through his keep just so he wouldn’t stay in one place. He prayed he wouldn’t run into more traitors – no! He was not going to pray, not to that – not because some boy made him!

Now he came upon increasingly many bodies as he ran seeking safety. Men, women, and children too. By the way they’d fallen, the young ones had either been used as hostages or killed out of pure spite. All the while, the presence of that boy haunted his steps, even as he tossed handfuls of pocket sand and ground glass at every dark alcove he passed.

When he reached the end of the corridor, he didn’t think twice before he shouldered through the door. It was the suite given to Baron Mordis and his party, he belatedly realized. The one Aiden had deliberately chosen because it was impossible to be visited – or leave – without everyone else on the floor knowing about it. He’d taken the wrong turn, dammit! He pushed down the panic.

There were no dead here, except for the spy girl that he’d painstakingly insinuated into Mordis’ castle over the past year.

The sight was as bitter as it was infuriating. The lass had been personally trained by Montrose before her demise, but now he found her laid out on the en-suite kitchen floor, wide-eyed and lifeless.

No wounds on her either, which meant she’d died to the prophet’s magic outright.

Valimar Mordis himself and his people were gone. All their essentials as well, even if the quarters had clearly been packed in a hurry. They’d all been spared. These were the standards he didn’t pass, the King of Alterac thought bitterly.

Mordis wasn’t with Twinblades, Aiden recalled as he peered outside. Angevin, Twinblades, and now another traitor is revealed, how many zealots did I miss? And the collapsed escape route – how long have they lied in wait in my court?!

Outside was the aftermath of a literal civil war. The bloodbath had managed to form several opposed camps by the time it spilled out of the keep’s front doors. The crownsguard and legion had disintegrated into many groups. The few who’d joined the traitors still lived. The rest had died on behalf of splinter factions that had once been his court, though you could barely tell which was which now. Many of them were dead too, and the rest were subdued and kneeling at swordpoint.

No calls for battle in Perenolde’s name, or the nation. No organisation. Just a panicking mob that had tried to escape, only to smash-face first into an unyielding wall of golden energy, leaving them vulnerable to being cut down and subjugated from the rear. Cowardice, it seemed, was not a big enough sin for the Light to take their senses as it had tried with him, Aiden thought bitterly.

There was a stream of escaped prisoners too, coming from the side. They were helping Twinblades, Mordis, and the Gilneas party in keeping the rest suppressed, and a path clear to the gatehouse as well.

Their efforts were for naught because barely anyone was passing through. Many people still couldn’t get through the forcefield for whatever reason, damming up against the edge of the dome of Light. Those few that did pass didn’t move any further to make room. They didn’t dare.

There were two giant dragons battling right outside, roaring, arguing in their reptilian tongue, shearing the air, spells and flames spewing through the wind while the earth shook like a constant earthquake. Even there, inside the castle, Aiden could feel the thrumming through the wall. He couldn’t tell the dragons’ colors through the gold, but…

Not all is going as you want!

Aiden took off running, out of room, through the half-collapsed hallways until he managed to dig through to another. Instead of out, he went inwards. The Prophet’s curse was a frightful doom breathing down his neck, but he now discovered a hidden wellspring of spite and wilfulness.

The secret ways were blocked by obvious sabotage. The front was certain death when everyone hated him. The side tunnels were just more of the same. He’d leave through the dungeons, but those had been the first place he sent people to, and none of his task forces had come back. Aiden wished he still had his butler and lackeys, but those who didn’t die in the golden blast were either dead to traitors or each other useless like he himself would-

Suddenly, the keep shook as if a load-bearing pillar had just snapped. The ceiling and roof both creaked and rumbled. Dust rose and fell abruptly, as what felt and sounded like an entire wing of the keep collapsed. The west one.

The corridor ahead screamed with air and ash, and a sulfur stench chased by a monster’s gurgling roar, another dragon?!

Aiden turned around and ran for his life.

A dragon inside his keep! Was this why – the last escape route! It was in the same direction, but then – the dragon had buried itself? Or was buried? Now it was digging its way out, he couldn’t go that way, he had to get away, he-!

Somehow, he didn’t know how, he managed to outrun the destruction. All the while, the one thought driving him forward was the knowledge that it wasn’t just his enemies meddling here.

The enemies of his enemies were also here, and if there was one outside perhaps there was one inside as well. Earlier that morning he’d said those things to his new wife mostly in jest, but now-

If there were dragons fighting on his side, then this was not as over and done with as that boy wanted him to think. If there was no way out, that just meant the opposite was true going back in.

He made it to his throne room almost unimpeded, ignoring the way the debris thinned and the bodies gradually multiplied on the way over. He hit the hidden control in his throne to slam the main doors shut. The ward also shimmered to being despite everything, that was one expense he would no longer allow anyone to gainsay him on.

He barricaded the side door he came in through, and was just done doing the same to the other one when an unexpected voice made him nearly jump out of his skin.

“Your Majesty.”

“Hellspawns!” He whirled around with a shout and met the eyes of the Dalaran emissary before he could remember it was a bad idea.

Nothing happened.

“You – mage,” Aiden gasped, mind racing as he blinked rapidly. “You – are unaffected?”

“Not quite,” replied Archmage Krasus, formerly of the Council of Six. The elven wizard… was just there, no sudden noise of displacement of wind, he’d not teleported? Had he been waiting here, invisible? “However, I am more adept than most of my sort when it comes to lifeworker arts.”

“Your sort-?”

The door Aiden had first come through blew inwards.

Through the dust came his new wife.

… This is not how I envisioned getting the answers to my questions.

“Husband,” the far too self-assured voice of Ysolde Prestor came. “Are you well?”

For a moment, the King of Alterac was frozen in indecision. To his right was the woman he’d just married. To his left was the Dalaran Archmage who’d just recently been dismissed from the Council of Six under suspicious circumstances. Of the two, only the man dared meet his eyes. She was avoiding his and the other man’s both, even as the Archmage was shamelessly seeking hers. Elf was as unconcerned with the forced-upon magic as he was willing to use it – wait.

… The wizard is in league with the boy? Or his patron! Damn him, it never even occurred to him, at most he thought the Archbishop – but the elves! Those damned elves and their superiority, if he lived forever and wanted to put a mere mortal in his place, propping up the local hopeless idealist in a generation-long scheme would be exactly what he’d do too. “Wife,” Aiden said, looking away from the mage and straight at her. “Look at me.”

The woman, bless her, understood his meaning immediately. She grimaced in distaste, but obliged him despite that.

When the double vision came, it was his foundational memory that predominated for the first time ever.

The vision ended with an aftertaste of existential dread, and a crystal-clear reinforcement that recognizing and appeasing the proverbial cuckoo remained one’s most crucial and inherent survival skill.

He stared at his wife. The she-dragon. The cuckoo that had been won over by the nesting bird.

And as she stared back, the two wordlessly reached an understanding that Aiden had wasted far too long eluding.

If his own kind had done nothing but fail and betray him even at his worst, if they didn’t have even a measly bird’s worth of basic sense and self-preservation, what was even left for him to do but join the side of monsters?

King Aiden Perenolde of Alterac Kingdom looked into the eyes of a dragon and felt no more human than she did. Arcane lights whisked over fingers. His own were already tight around his rapier hilt.

The two of them turned to the third, united in grim purpose.

Archmage Krasus pulled his hands from his sleeves. He looked upon Aiden’s new wife with contempt. He looked upon him, the King, with pity. “As Dalaran envoy I must avoid diplomatic incidents, but my charge as a Lifekeeper is to protect all things from the predations of the void things and their slaves. This woman is a black dragon, the most insidious of her brood. For the sake of all sense and time quickly running out for all of us, Your Majesty, please stand aside.”

“I’m sorry, mage.” Aiden drew his blade. “I’m afraid I can’t do thaAH!“

A mere gesture had Aiden flying clear across the entire hall to a rolling heap at the foot of the doors.

It still didn’t spare him the scalding cascade of smoke and steam as fire and ice clashed in the middle of his throne room.

“-. Kairozdormu .-“

The Prophet had not invited him along for the last act. In return, the dragon had not pressed the issue either. He was left behind with the rest of the prisoners, which was as considerate of his crippled state as it was galling. It wouldn’t have been so humiliating if not for the reason he was spurned.

He’d tried to pass through the dome and he’d failed. The forcefield judged you on your merits, it didn’t let you pass unless you possess at least three of the nine noble virtues, at least as its caster understood them. He’d been angry, but he’d been doubly offended at the half-assed conditions for passage. If you’re going to judge people based on moral criteria, at least have the fortitude to demand they measure up to half or more!

Most of all, he’d been outraged when he didn’t measure up to even a mere third. He’d passed discipline and perseverance, only to fail courage by a narrow margin.

Now, the great bronze dragon was just another cripple being pushed and jostled, in a hasty bid by the unjustly imprisoned to escape the keep before the ‘Rotten ones’ tried to kill them again, or constant earthquakes collapsed the whole world on their heads.

It was a foolish fear, the earthquake was deliberately weak and very regular in its recurrence, clearly generated by the golden black dragon in a bid to incentivise everyone below to run as far away as possible before it was too late. Successfully too.

But he couldn’t explain that and still pass as a common victim of tyranny, so he let himself be pulled on with the rest. Limped forth on his one leg and makeshift crutch while reconsidering everything that had brought him here.

The sudden disappearance of all Infinite Dragonflight meddling from the future coincided with the moment of Wayland Hywel’s conception. That in itself was not remarkable, mortals of all races were produced every moment. But his sire, the Aspect of Time Nozdormu, had found a correlation in the increasing difficulty to scry him, whether via divination magic or the Caverns of Time themselves. A difficulty which Kairozdormu himself had been enlisted to corroborate, which he did.

The farther into the future you looked, to more likely you were to find gold glowing eyes staring back, and nothing besides save the void.

More tellingly, the Aspect of Time had seen fit to share all this with only Kairozdormu, at least for now. It was a profound change from how borderline sidelined he had been before. He was still deciding if the Time Aspect merely pre-empted Kairozdormu’s own discovery for efficiency’s sake, or if it was a roundabout way to tell him he’d been stonewalling Kairozdormu before. In which case Nozdormu had only been keeping him close to watch what was a destined traitor.

To take it all as an honor or an insult, well, that was something Kairozdormu was also still deciding. Unlike the dogmatists, he was self-aware enough to know his future self would surely be among the Infinites’ ranks, provided he didn’t die beforehand. Their purpose for existing was the same as his own secret aim: to reject the hellscape that the Golden Timeline had become – would have become – and take active steps to change the future for the better. Even if that meant traveling to the past to change history for the better.

Perhaps the Infinites still existed, but had ceased their activities because they already got what they wanted. Their disappearance from time could just as well mean they won the time war. Kairozdormu hadn’t considered it before, but he did now. 

He was reconsidering the plausibility of some of his more outlandish notions too, about what the dragonflights could do if all their powers were taken to their ultimate conclusion. Particularly if the Aspects leveraged the Titan assets still extant on this world. Nozdormu hadn’t pre-empted Kairozdormu about that, and while that could mean many things… it also allowed for the possibility that Kairozdormu wasn’t merely chasing geese.

But then why did Nozdormu make his confidence conditional on me gaining Wayland’s? The dragon in crippled human shape wondered as he stumbled to a halt when the crowd got too thick to keep on fleeing. History doesn’t change for any one person.

Kairozdormu was among the few Bronze Dragons who actually grasped the full implications of the Infinites’ existence being prevented. Not merely countered but rendered completely absent in both future and past. He was above most others in their flight because he’d worked his way into being made a Keeper of Time, as opposed to being raised to it while being fed crumbs by Nozdormu. He’d acquired his skills and insight mostly on his own, even if he’d had to go around and even against the other keepers a time or five hundred.

He even went against Nozdormu himself a time or two. Ever since Deathwing tricked the other Aspects into giving up most of their powers to the Dragon Soul, the Aspect of Time had become so absorbed by his imperfect visions of potential timelines that he’d begun to slip.

It had been frustrating, but gave Kairozdormu himself an uncommonly pragmatic understanding of the Bronze Dragonflights’ limitations, and its follies. At the very least, he wouldn’t go the way of the dogmatists like Chronormu, who wouldn’t realize that Murozond and Nozdormu were the same dragon even if it stared them in the face.

That was, in fact, objective truth – Kairozodormu had watched it happen in the future through the Caverns of Time. Before that future vanished like so many others.

It would have been comical if their plight were not so bleak. Theirs and the plight of the world, nay, the cosmos itself. Had been so bleak, though after the time he’d had recently, he was beginning to wonder if he’d made a mistake assuming things were truly better.

Perhaps the Infinites still exist, the bronze dragon thought as he stopped to catch his breath. Which he could only do because the rest of the group he was with had slowed down after emerging into the bloody aftermath of the Alterac Keep courtyard. Maybe they aren’t trying to change history anymore because they already got what they wanted. Their disappearance from time could just as well mean they won the time war. Kairozdormu hadn’t considered it before, but he did now. 

He was reconsidering the plausibility of some of his more outlandish notions too, about what the dragonflights could do if all their powers were taken to their ultimate conclusion. Particularly if the Aspects leveraged the Titan assets still extant on this world. Nozdormu hadn’t pre-empted Kairozdormu about that, and while that could mean many things… it also allowed for the possibility that Kairozdormu wasn’t merely chasing geese.

But then why did Nozdormu make his confidence conditional on me gaining Wayland’s? The dragon in crippled human shape wondered as he stumbled to a halt when the crowd got too thick to let them move further. Is he already so hard to divine that even the Aspect of Time did not discern his true character? Or did Nozdormu only keep me in the dark about it?

Being put through nigh-unbearable torture should have engendered some sympathy. Being crippled and maimed should have won him even more.

Instead, the Prophet had held Kairozdormu’s actions in contempt. All of them.

He had expected some misgivings, but not that. He’d not expected a saint to…

To be so callous.

Kairozdormu might have understood if he himself had been putting on a front, but the torture truly had been every bit as bad as it looked. He’d been put through so much torment and lost so much strength of spirit and flesh that he didn’t even dare turn back into his dragon form. He didn’t think he’d retain consciousness if he did. Limb loss was usually a problem only from the other side of the transformation, but the torture instruments were bespelled, and the poisons…

He’d been put through hell for months at this point.

He hadn’t expected Wayland to hold a prejudice against the entirety of dragonkind either. For what Nozdormu saw as the linchpin of the epoch to genuinely consider dragons to be mentally challenged as a species…

Well. It was only less outrageous than redeeming a member of the blacks. Kairozdormu had not seen that coming either. Not in what he could perceive of the time ways, and not in the Caverns of Time before he left them to play kingmaker.

Is any one human truly worth betting so much on, when the world’s fate still turns on our whims more than his?

It wasn’t something Kairozdormu used to think twice about, before the Infinites abruptly stopped trying to change history through time travel on account of no longer existing. Now, though, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t been too optimistic. For all the changes that the prophet had affected, they all seemed about to be undone or offset until they made no difference.

By dragons.

Kairozdormu could have understood if it was another black that attacked Fahrad, they surely wouldn’t take the redemption of the greatest kinslayer lying down.

But what the hell was the Red thinking?

And more importantly…

Can Wayland actually recover from this?

Not only had he sacrificed all the power he’d amassed in a single spellstrike, but his actions had resulted in the violent and traumatic death of men, women and even children. Hundreds of them.

Can he really be the source of all the changes, if everything he’s done can still be ruined so utterly? So easily?

By now, the group had started moving again and were almost to the gatehouse, when the golden dome rung like a gong above them from the crash of dragon upon dragon. The mass of humanity around him panicked suddenly.

Next thing he knew he was knocked over, his nose bleeding from the fall and subsequent stomp on his head. His mouth filled with mud and dust. He gasped for breath only to choke when someone else stepped on him – stomped on him as – he was being trampled!

After all I’ve done, his fury came alight like an unholy flame deep inside him. All I’ve sacrificed, all that effort for these creatures and they’re no better than braying sheep at the first sign of trouble, I should just-

The Light enveloped him, then formed a shell of protection. It had… an all-new flavor.

“Out of the way!”  The voice… It was young woman. A young woman who managed to make herself heard over the frenzied mob, and even the blasts of flames and angry roars of the red and black dragons battling up above them all. “Everyone get clear, now! Shame on you, all of you, can you not you see what you are doing?!”

Kairozdormu felt a pair of dainty hands pull him up from the ground and push more of the soothing magic into him, easing his pain. When his hazy sight cleared, he saw a girl. Or young woman? She couldn’t be any older than Wayland. He…

He knew this one. “Mara Fordragon?”

The young woman snapped her eyes to his, clearly intending to force the Truth as was now happening for all. Kairozdormu almost couldn’t suppress the shared vision in time, such was his reaction to her presence here. When nothing happened, she hesitated… then continued healing him and wiping his face of blood and dirt, just as before. “You know me, sir?”

"… You are not a face I expected to see today.”

“And I wouldn’t expect someone’s eyes to tell me so little, today, yet here we are.”

… Titans, I’ve been out of the Caverns for too long if I didn’t see her being here. What else had changed in the time since? What else did he miss? “But still not suspicious enough to deny me aid?”

“Not enough to change what I’d have done regardless.” The girl got up and helped him to his feet – foot. “Valea! I need – yes, thank you, you two, over here! Sir, I must see to others, these men will see you to safety-”

Just then the red dragon managed to finally smash the golden black off the Dome of Penitence. The two dragons grappled while they fell, crashing down on the street in a snarling frenzy of claws, bites and breath attacks. The dome didn’t dim immediately, but it started to.

The only reason none of the people outside were crushed was because a sheet of light appeared over them, causing the two to slide over it and onwards in the plaza beyond. It hadn’t come from Fordragon or anyone else inside. That left outside. The golden black. The black was protecting them at his own expense. The one dragon that should have been the worst of them all, he was the only one who hadn’t lost control.

Despite the near boiling chaos around him, Kairozdormu couldn’t help but laugh. Never mind Wayland’s actions, history was completely broken just by this! And Mara Fordragon wasn’t even alone! There was Valea Twinblades here, and Genn Greymane and his father too, the royal prince and king of Gilneas helping to coordinate the evacuation now that the fighting had finally died down.

People who still had ten or twenty years before their names were supposed to go down in history, they were all here, and more – that – was that Aedelas Blackmoore over there?! What was he even doing here? He was barely ten years old, nobody else had brought children younger than twelve to this whole farce? He was fatherless, who even was his regent – what was he doing? Thrall’s slavemaster and tormentor – caring for the sick?!

Kairozdormu laughed even harder as the little humans around him mastered their bloodlust and differences. Even as his fellow dragons of black and red battled like frenzied beasts that threatened to crush any who tried to flee. History doesn’t change for any one person, except when said person infects literally everyone else he crosses paths with!

Nozdormu, Kairozdormu, the reds, the rest of the dragons that were supposedly somewhere around here, all of them – they’d all made the same mistake of obsessing over a single person, a single linchpin, when in fact the true changes had been germinating all along everywhere else! Townsmen, peasants, craftsmen, thugs, assassins, farmers, soldiers, nobles, dragons, more dragons, even an angel!

What was even left? Would Wayland somehow convert the gods next? Mayhap even the Titans themselves!

“-thing we can do, he’s not the first and we’ll see many more break down before this is over!” Mara was telling someone even as the madness continued everywhere around them. “I hate to say it, but we’ve more wounded and young coming, we’ve done what we can for him. We could try to retake the keep, but it’s still more dangerous here than out there, Ser Saidan still hasn’t – just get him through the dome-“

CRA-KA-THOOM.

A literal thunder sounded in their ears. And their chests. Even bones. The work of spirits of some nature, he could feel wills and wisps of energy all through the air. The Prophet had even advanced his shamanism, Kairozdormu should never have let himself be caged.

Everyone stopped. Even the dragons that were half-way done crawling back up the forcefield.

“Lady Rheastrasza,” Wayland’s voice came from the keep’s front doors, flat and malcontent. “Would you kindly back off so the innocents can start getting to safety?”

The red dragon was distracted just enough for the black to kick her away. She staggered, snarled at the interruption, and finally froze at the sight of literal hundreds of people huddled both inside and out of the dome. Staring at her.

She gave Wayland an unfathomable stare, cast her eyes over the rest of the crowd, didn’t spot Kairozdormu for what he truly was, and finally pulled out of her battle lust. Finally, she realized that all the people there, especially those outside the dome, old and young alike, were cowering in fear.

Of her.

The red pulled back, jumped up and flew to hang from the side of the mountain above the keep. Too far to make out her face, which wasn’t as expressive as mortals in any case…

But Kairozdormu didn’t need to see her to know what she felt.

“Thank you,” Wayland grunted, his voice still thrumming like thunder in everyone’s chests. “Everyone move – do not stampede!” He… did not sound entirely confident or composed. “Many who live deserve death, but some who died deserved life. They’re only gone because they were killed by some of you who are here.” His voice turned cold then. “I am not judging you myself only because the true enemy is still inside. I strongly suggest you don’t make me decide you’re the more urgent problem.”

“… Take him,” Mara abruptly shoved Kairozdormu to the two men that had come to help. “I ned to – I must go!”

“Wait,” Karizdormu grunted, summoning what shred of his true strength he still could. It was barely enough to escape the hold of the humans, but he could walk. “Take me with you. I need to talk to him-”

“So does everyone else, I’m sure!” Mara was already rushing away. “Doubtless he’ll make time when we’re not all-“

“He’s my employer!” He barked, barely managing not to sway from daze at the effort. The mob had stomped on his head quite hard, damn. “I’ve been in the dungeons ever since – I need to talk to him. Now.”

“You’re what? He’s – very well, lean on me, we’ll-”

There was a roar inside the keep, followed by a massive blast of flames that blew out a dozen windows on the keep’s second floor. Rock and stone creaked and crackled in the wake of the ash and smoke, then it felt as if the entire Alterac Castle bent under a sudden weight. Kairozdormu was not a black dragon, but he could feel the earth shift such that he nearly fell off of his lone, numb foot.

A rumble. Walls cracked, ceilings and floors fell inward, glass rained down from shattered window panes.

Everyone watched in shock as half the west wing of Alterac Castle from the second story up collapsed inward.

A massive cloud of pitch and dust deluged over them all like a volcano’s flow.

Kairozdormu was too bewildered by this impossible, unforeseen development to think about protective magics in time. He choked and coughed on the ashes like everyone else, and as his eyes stung as if dunked in acid, Kairozdormu could not help but think of volcanoes and pyroclastic flows.

This rancid flavor, pitch mixed in with dust from the debris and the sulfur smell of rotten eggs – finally, the black dragon reveals itself! None of the visions had you acting in the open so blatantly, but if that’s how you want it, dear Onyx-

That wasn’t Onyxia.

The prophet’s spirits strained to keep the worst of the plume away so they didn’t all choke to death, but Kairozdormu no longer cared about that. He stared up and gaped at the hazy silhouette of a black she-dragon that wasn’t Onyxia.

What – how? It was Onyxia, I know it was – it should have been Onyxia, I saw it!

Dammit, was nothing seen in the timeways reliable anymore? He couldn’t even blame the inferior quality of bronze dragon scrying magics! He’d witnessed many variations of today’s events in the Caverns of Time in order to refine his plan, but they were variations, not completely different developments! He’d spent years setting things up after that, made every preparation, sent every feeler and laid every lure for this day. Nothing had been left to chance –

Fahrad’s redemption. The creation of Emerentius completely blindsided him…

But that shouldn’t matter! Not in such a short time window, and everything else had unfolded as he foresaw it. Perhaps not the prophet’s rejection of him, but Rheastrasza’s presence, and more importantly the way she got involved – everything unfolded exactly as he had foreseen. She was here, so was he, and with Korialstrasz and Onyxia somewhere within there was precisely one part left to play, and he’d made sure it would be a blue!

He’d painstakingly sent feelers and set lures for months to make it happen, before he hired himself on as a farmhand even, this made no sense! Who even was it if not-

“Curse you, human!” He heard her voice even before he saw it. “Curse you, but you’ve failed! You thought to bring this building down on me? We are the masters of flame and earth! We feast on searing metals and drink from magma streams, what is a house of stones and mortar? Nothing! And now you, too, are nothing! Hrgh – gckh! Pest!”

There was no man’s body that could be seen, and the dust cover was still so thick that no one could keep their eyes open for long without tearing up. Everyone was harshly choking and coughing… But you couldn’t miss or mistake the rasping, crazed timber of that monster, or the hacking sounds as she coughed up half a shield and some armor.

“No!” Lady Mara cried in anguish next to him, falling to her knees with hands over her mouth. “Ser Saidan!”

“Grrr – hrk – pah!” The black she-dragon retched and regurgitated an arm and a leg, one by one. “I’ll enjoy passing you, human, such insolence as yours – not for three hundred years have I – wait…”

Black scales, size so enormous that no one save Deathwing himself was bigger, that voice that sounded like her throat was scarred from fire despite that black dragons breathed it. Scarred – scars all over her body! Burns! Burns so hot and severe they’d even scarred a lava dweller! She was covered in them, that – this was –

“Who – oh – ohohohohoho!” Laughed the black she-dragon all of a sudden, he didn’t understand- “So that’s what you were really after! It’s not enough to bury me alive, you thought so deny me my vengeance! I see it now, you were stalling all along, you’re in league with him! You almost had me, what an insidious insect you are!”

“Sintharia,” Kairozdormu gasped through a sore throat. “Sinestra – Deathwing’s consort –“ The one that still lived – the only one who survived mating with the corrupted Aspect of the Earth, she was here?! “How – why her –? Here – this is bad! This is very, very bad!”

“Oh, how I’ve stewed and readied for revenge!” Rumbled lady Sinestra as her huge body was engulfed by the glow of shape change. “To have it denied me in the eleventh hour – no! I will not allow it!”

Inexplicably, Sintharia – Sinestra, or whatever name she went by now. She turned back into a human instead of continuing the rampage she clearly had no reservations about pursuing – she – she ran and vanished back into the keep? What?

“Accursed dragons!” Wayland’s hand split the smog with a screeching windshear. As his spirits blew the worst of the smog away and began collecting it in a whirlwind above the castle maze, he jumped straight from the top stairs of the castle into their midst. His oncoming form was like a white and golden spirit of wrath and vengeance, but his voice – it lacked its prior strength. “Light forbid we be allowed to solve our own problems! You just have to stick your noses into everything, even if it means breaking what little is left of the world! I need volunteers!”

Volunteers for what? Wayland couldn’t mean – this was no time for skewed priorities! That was – who was she wanting to – “Korialstrasz!” The realization finally found him. Kairozdormu tried to push himself up with the arm he didn’t have.

“Who said that? You – oh. Of course it’s you.” Wayland hurried over and knelt to help him sit up as best he could on a single leg. “What did you say? Who was that? Where is she going?”  

“Korialstrasz – Krasus, she wants revenge!” The heavens and hells all curse the black dragons, would they never be spared their insanity?! Kairozdormu could breathe again, and see again beyond thirty meters, but of the last dragon there was no sign. If Sinestra was here, then what about Onyxia? Where was that blasted wench?

Wayland grabbed his face with both hands. “Speak!”

“Lady Sinestra – Sintharia – she’s Deathwing’s consort. She tried to bring down the Kirin Tor some time ago, but Krasus stopped her. I don’t know why she waited so long, Krasus has been here for days, he even managed to see me in the dungeons, but – if she’s here, she’s not alone. Or she is, but she’s not the only one, Onyxia may also be here! She’s-”

“I know who she is,” Wayland let go and rubbed a hand over own his face, looking first angry, then frustrated, then bleak.

The resignation that stole over his features was enough to shock even Kairozdormu out of his frantic outrage. It – that wasn’t any mere dejection, it was despair sunk so deep that it circled all the way into toneless misery.

“What even is the point?” Wayland asked dismally, even he – even his will was spent? “Just to drive us into a corner? Why would we serve when we don’t even care enough to rule anymore? The world ended once already and their prisons are still there, this just means there’ll be less of us to fool into getting them loose. If you disenfranchise the young too much, we’ll burn the whole world down just to feel the heat.”

There had been plenty of anger and grief on the way out from the dungeons, from all the people, but those feelings were shattered now. Everyone now believed that Alterac’s royal house was controlled by evil black dragons.

Now those same feelings were as dead as their hopes. Such was the impact of seeing their holy saviour brought to despair.

Wayland closed his eyes, took a deep breath and slowly released it. “Be sober like the earth and you will not lack anything. The branch full of fruit is broken faster by wind, the seed too deep cannot push through and too much water crumbles its breath.” His eyes snapped open. “I need that debris moved, as much of it as you all can, dig out the bodies! I have enough left in me for one last calamity and one last miracle, but if they come back while still crushed and buried, I may as well be the first who falls to hell. I need volunteers!

“You have them!” Bravely proclaimed the Lady Mara, standing up at once. “Where would you have us?”

“I need people who know the castle, as many as possible, is there anyone who knows the secret ways? Some of them might still be open, if we can just find them-”

Shadows flowed out of someone Kairozdormu hadn’t thought twice about. The man blitzed through the crowd faster than you could draw a knife, left half a dozen dead in his wake and stopped on one knee before the saint. “Beg pardon, your holiness.” He said while a bunch of others did the same among the masses all over the yard. “We were hoping to find the last rotten apples, but if you need the secret ways, we know them best.”

“… Jorach. You were here all along. Of course you are.” Wayland covered his mouth, but couldn’t stop a short startled laugh slipping out. “I’ll be counting on you and yours, then – how many...?”

The answer turned out to be about a dozen assassins hidden among the crowd. Which were just the ones left after the holy smite took out the rest of the ones that Ravenholdt had brought along.

For the second time that day, Kairozdormu began to laugh. At the mess he was in, at the humans around him, at the young holy man who’d spoiled his grand scheme without even knowing about it, and most of all he laughed at himself.

With a wrench in his soul, his very spirit became fuel for a spell of temporal reversion.

His leg grew back. His arm too. At least that was what it looked like. His breath rattled with the effort, and the pain of using what dregs of spirit he still had in place of flesh, to revert his limbs to before the moment they were hewn.

Everyone but the prophet and his pet killers drew away in fright. Then further as they realized he was the source of the new mad cackling.

He was – so tired, the torture – the human form should be a healing reprieve when a dragon’s true form is grievously injured, it was no small thing to do the same in reverse. He – didn’t have enough to risk – shouldn’t try to turn back into a dragon in his state, he’d lost too much, the crippling, maiming – Perenolde had even found spirit-burning poisons, was that Sinestra’s influence as well?

“Kairozdormu…” Wayland said lowly . “You don’t have to do this.”

“Earlier, I tried – to leave the dome as you told me – but I was denied because I failed the test of courage.” Turning away, Kairozdormu exited the mass of humanity, magical shimmers coursing over his skin. “I didn’t understand it then, I never planned to leave to begin with, never intended to let anyone else decide the conclusion of this scheme of mine. How fitting that a saint should differentiate between courage and hubris!”

His change to his true form almost knocked him unconscious, such was the damage that had carried through. He – might have lost time regardless, he didn’t remember reaching the keep’s walls, or when he stopped half-way up the climb. With an effort of will, he clawed his way up to where Sintharia had burst through, took as deep a lungful of air as he ever had, and breathed the sands of time upon the ruin.

He didn’t remember stopping, but he must have. His footing was loose beneath him now, no more broken masonry and rubble littering the flooring still intact, mixed in with blood and rags. There was only the dust left at the end of entropic decay, and the untouched flesh of fresh human corpses safe inside beds of powder. Just as he’d wanted.

He fell more than climbed back down.

“That – should make it easier,” he groaned when he finally made out the Prophet and his devotees through his blurry sight, old and new. “Mortar and stone – it’s all dust now, save the bodies. Hurry now… The others – they won’t wait.”

Wayland punched his snout suddenly. “Don’t you dare pass out, you’re too big and heavy to move! At least get outside first-“

“I – won’t be able,” the dragon rasped, struggling to keep open just one eye. “That – wasn’t courage.”  

“… No,” Wayland said sadly, his hand more gentle now. “It wasn’t.”

“Do you know – Prophet – what the Aspects could do all together? And the Titan engines too! Curse Deathwing and his Demon Soul!”

If only Kairozdormu had been alive then, around to warn then not to give their powers to the traitor…

But would they have listened?

“The Aspect of Life is a record of all life in the world, anything could rebirth… Everything… Time – we bronze can scry the world as it was at any point in its history. With Dream – Ysera can fathom the entire world in her slumber, the Emerald Dream itself could become the world as it was before! If only the Earth had not betrayed us, he and the Magic together could refashion the Arcane itself according to its own pattern. Impose the Dream of the World-that-Was was upon the World-that-is! Can you imagine it?”

“… The Titan Forges,” Wayland understood, of course he did, if not him then who among the mortals even could? “Re-Origination but with extra steps – are you saying it’s possible to rewind time for the entire planet?”

Belatedly, the bronze dragon felt chagrin at just spilling his mad thoughts out in the open, two blacks were here, three if you counted the gold one. The Enemy – it always listened – had surely listened in – oh.

There was the Light and the Wind and hot mists around the two of them, Wayland had already taken steps to prevent anyone else from hearing or seeing them converse.

“I’m saying,” the dragon struggled to say before he forgot. “That I think it’s already been done.” He locked his eye on the human’s face. “You were not meant to exist, and the Infinites vanished from time the moment you began to form in your mother’s womb. The future we knew, the one that Nozdormu once knew – it’s gone.”

“Because it’s all in the past after you lot reset the world?” Instead of being thunderstruck by revelation, the young prophet was skeptical and – and something – what? “… No, I don’t think so.”

What was he – “You would just dismiss-“

“If something like that did ever happen, I doubt it happened here. Either way, it has nothing to do with me. I came over here all on my own.”

The dragon’s thoughts skittered ungainly. What did he mean – ah… The Light… it soothed his pains like the flames of life never could, it was… so –  “Nooo…” Kairozdormu moaned, rolling over and away, out of the sight and sound concealing bubble. “Don’t – the relief – leave the pain, I – I don’t dare pass out any more than you want me to. Just – need a moment…”

“… You and you, watch him. The rest of you, bring down the corpses, you needn’t be too gentle, just do your best to keep them in one piece. Lady Mara, Lady Valea, your majesties, I hate to say this but you need to pause the evacuation.”

“We understand,” came the gravelly voice of Archibald Greymane. “We need to keep numerical superiority, or the rotten ones will try to take us down with them again.”

“Father, you leave, I will stay and-“

“And nothing! I’m old, the future of our house is with you now.”

“How will we know when to leave?” Twinblades asked over the argument.

“When it’s time, everyone will know, I’ll make sure of it. If he can’t move on his own by then, save yourselves.”

“We will, do not worry for us,” said Lady Mara. “Lightspeed, your holiness.”

“Nowhere near that fast, I’m afraid.”

Kairozdormu thought that would be it, but it wasn’t. Instead, he felt Wayland’s hand on the back of his neck. “Kairozdormu, if you meant anything of what you ever told me-“

The dragon grunted. “Everything.”

“Then live. And when this is over, go ask Nozdormu if the Caverns make it possible to use portals that don’t yet exist. He’ll understand.”

Wayland turned and ran into the keep and out of hearing before Kairozdormu had a chance to reply.

Soon after, the only sounds were tromping feet, tired grunts, bodies being dragged, and calls for help and care as the humans set about their grim work.

The bronze dragon only realized he had passed out when he was abruptly snapped back awake.

Alterac Keep was rumbling like it only had when Sinestra broke it, and a mighty clangour sounded through its front doors. Roars, screams, crashes and explosions, intermixed with words muffled by wafts of cold and hot winds mixed together. Every once in a while, the castle lost another shingle or window. The noises came and they went, and came and went again, but didn’t cease.

Kairozdormu sunk his claws into the earth and made to rise. Somehow, he found the strength.

But not the will.

He – he’d definitely go in and lend his useless assistance to a cause he was virtually guaranteed not to survive anymore.

Just – just give him five more minutes.

Understanding Does Not Presage Peace - Chapter 22

The climax is had. I'm not perfectly satisfied with it, maybe ideas for better edits will come to me with time.

Thank you everyone for your patience.

--------------------------------------------------

Chapter 22: The Human Shield Dissensus

“-. Sarutobi Hiruzen, Third Hokage of the Village Hidden in the Leaves .-“

He was going to die here.

“Earth Release: Rock Bullet Barrage!”

“Wood Release: Impaling Spear Tree.”

He was going to die alone in the dark, as ninja should.

“Wood Release: Sea of Trees Erosion.”

“Wind Release: Razor Scythe Storm Reaping!”

He was going to die a failure, as ninja shouldn’t.

“Fire Release: Phoenix Fire!”

A safe path was cut through his barrage of projectiles by a tree that nearly impaled him, a swarm of giant wooden snakes retaliated with such speed that only wind release could overcome the area of effect quickly enough, and now his wide-area fire bombardment was blocked by a technique that took no hand seals to cast. A tree just sprouted between the masked man and the danger, the same as Danzo had done but faster.

“Finally,” The masked man grunted as his kunai found Hiruzen’s back. Despite that he’d deliberately landed in the middle of the ongoing conflagration in hopes of some concealment. No other stealth had worked, the enemy was some kind of sensor. “I’ll admit, you were a real annoyan-“

Hiruzen burst into smoke and left a block of stone.

“Fire Release: Phoenix Sage Fire!”

Another spontaneous tree burst up behind the masked man, but Hiruzen had lied when calling out the jutsu. Instead of straight-flying fire blasts, a roaring Fire Dragon wound around the tree and exploded in the enemy’s face from his blind side.

The masked man was blown off his feet and rolled away with the dull clatter of wood on rock, a clone!

“As I was saying,” the true enemy growled as his knife actually struck blood this time, straight through the heart. “You were a real annoyance, old man. As expected from Minato-Sensei’s-”

The Reverse Four Symbols Sealing technique annihilated Hiruzen’s blood clone in a black hole that was just a sliver too slow.

The enemy lost his right arm and leg, but no more because he partially evaded even that despite complete surprise, he was as fast as Minato!

Claims to be Minato’s student, but who – they’re all dead – unless – little Obito?!

The absurd claim momentarily threw Hiruzen’s mind into complete disarray. He just barely managed to keep his concentration on the chakra-containment barrier he was hiding in, down in the rock beneath the foe. He almost failed to press his last chance too.

He almost botched the next blood clone, and not because he was running on fumes after all the soldier pills. The jutsu was taxing on not just chakra, it took animated clay mixed in with blood, more blood than he could spare now, especially at his age. Hiruzen was cheating by using pre-drawn blood packs, but he was on the very last one there too. He also lacked the inventor’s ability to truly split his consciousness, so he practically had to leave his body behind to pilot it with one of the Yamanaka’s techniques, which also limited his range.

The only reason he’d included it in his prep-work for ROOT was because the close quarters and abundance of cover made up for the range. Even then, he was glad he hadn’t needed to use it after realising he’d overestimated Danzo’s reaction speed.

He wasn’t overestimating anything here.

Hiruzen – his clone – seeped out of his hiding place sideways, reformed well below the surface of that strange place, emerged in a flicker from the complete opposite direction from the enemy, and managed to strike just before Obito would have warped out of whatever this place was.

The enemy still managed to deflect Hiruzen’s attempt to cut his head off. Even lacking two limbs and torso flesh down to the ribcage.

“Does everyone have a way to cheat death now?!” Obito grunted as he backhanded Hiruzen away with a tentacle of wooden branches. “I’m starting to feel offended.”

Hiruzen landed with a groan, the pain feedback rocking him down in his hiding place. The major benefit of the blood clone was that even the best bloodline techniques couldn’t recognize it for a fake, if cast correctly. Also, the very slight delay in feedback with the original consciousness revealed even the most subtle genjutsu. The drawback of the Yamanaka mind-transfer jutsu was harsh enough on its own, but…

It’s worth it, he told himself as he rolled to his feet. It’s worth it to break Obito’s constant genjutsu attacks

“Hng!” Hiruzen grunted, blocking the predictable kick but forced to give up his footing lest the sheer strength break his arms. He slid and skipped back two pillars and two bottomless pits. He used a chakra pulse from his original body to break the genjutsu Obito next caught his clone in, and spat an air bullet in the Uchiha’s real face instead of the fake one he’d projected. Next kick came – evade, deflect next three, deflect chest strike, defend left face, right face, side-step dropkick, grab leg under the arm and throw.

Obito fell on his shoulder and managed to roll back to his feet by the end of his slide.

“Unbelievable,” Hiruzen wheezed. “It really is Minato’s modification of the Uchiha interceptor fist.”

“Finally starting to believe, Lord Hokage?” The enemy taunted him, even though he still didn’t realize it had been all clones for the past four engagements. “Wood Release: Sprawling Impaling Forest!”

Hiruzen leapt back as far as he could but the called attack never came, even as all the platforms shook and rumbled – he wasn’t the target? Oh no!

He pulled out of his clone and back into his real body just in time to twist his neck out of the way of a too sharp spike. He cut a second with a wind-coated palm, but three more had already gored him him despite his rock armor jutsu. It had diverted the worst strikes from vitals, but not completely turned them aside. He severed them too, used a hasty earth swimming technique to abandon his shelter barrier, and flowed up and out of the ground to jump clear of the danger.

He landed on the distant-most platform he could and wrestled with dismay at what he saw around him. The technique had been aimed out instead of up or down, every pillar in his line of sight had been drilled through by so many roots and branches that there was scarcely room to fall between the pillars anymore.

He finally figured it out, Hiruzen thought grimly, pushing through his light-headed weariness to force aside the pain. He still couldn’t find me so he just attacked every possible hiding place at once, what monstrous chakra, does he have no limit at all?

Obito came down from above with an axe kick, so fast that even Hiruzen almost couldn’t dodge it. Almost. He avoided the next three hits too, deflected two more, blocked the next feint to make it look like he fell for it, then he stepped into the roundhouse kick of Obito’s now entirely predictable taijutsu to swing the secret chakra blade he’d kept in reserve until just then.

The wind blade grew outward from the tip and finally severed the foe’s head clean at the neck.

Let that be it.

The Third Hokage jumped clear of the falling body just in case, but his knees buckled on landing. I’m so tired. He was exhausted, in pain all over, his stomach felt like it was eating itself from the ulcer of too many soldier pills and -

The headless corpse collapsed forward in a pool of blood.

Obito’s head struck earth with a dull thunk, rolled away, and fell of the square platform of rock.

Silence fell, for a minute. Then two. At three minutes, Hiruzen stumbled forward and stabbed a kunai or shuriken in every vital and locomotion point of Obito’s that he had weapons for. By the fourth minute, Hiruzen was hard-pressed to stave off the adrenaline crash, hands shaking as he tried to bandage his own wounds. By minute six, his mind and body began to shut down all on their own at the lack of a threat. Eight minutes in, he could barely stay upright even on his knees. When the tenth rolled around with no further changes, Hiruzen finally allowed himself to slump forward and breathe.

The ground exploded upward.

Everywhere.

“Ogh!”

It was only his lingering suspicions from having recently experienced Danzo’s Izanagi that saved his life.

But not his arm.

The Third Hokage gasped in agony as his right hand was caught in a razor net of branches just as he rolled away. His hand was lost from right above the wrist, along with his chakra blade.

Accursed Uchiha! Sarutobi Hiruzen grit his teeth as he used a hasty fire transformation to cauterize his wound, hoping not to faint from his body trying and failing to set off another adrenaline rush just after a crash. But that was his last sharingan, he can’t do it again, now he should be blind-

The sprawling impaling forest didn’t let him think further, or do anything but dodge, jump and run for his life as it erupted around him, for half again as long as he’d stood watch over the corpse. His breath got ever thinner, his body felt like it would come apart at the seams, his head felt lighter and lighter as the combat crash began to-

When Hiruzen finally felt like the wide-area destruction technique was winding down, Obito unexpectedly emerged from one of the branches, took Hiruzen’s wind-coated hand drill through the chest without even trying to dodge, and reached out with his hand.

“ARGH!” Hiruzen cried out as he failed to lean away due to wood at his back.

Obito’s grasping fingers ripped the Third Hokage’s right eye straight out.

“Wind – Whirl – Hundred Scythes!” Hiruzen moaned. He couldn’t form hand seals and barely slurred half the technique name, producing a shadow of the intended jutsu. Obito was still blown away in their combined distraction, but the boughs and thorns between them were barely scratched.

If only I could summon Enma.

“I’m going to kill you, old man,” Obito growled from where he knelt on a branch above him, covering his stolen eye as it healed in place. “After all this, I might even enjoy it.”

“Finally – out of extra lives – boy?” Hiruzen panted with fake bravado as he covered his empty socket while glaring up with his remaining eye. “Is that all – it takes for – the mask to come off?”

“I could just leave you here to die.”

“Please do,” Hiruzen goaded, unsure if he should still hope for the opposite. Every moment he remained a nuisance was a moment Obito couldn’t abuse his teleportation and intangibility power in the real world. Every moment he remained a nuisance was time bought for those left behind. But Sarutobi was no nuisance to anyone like this, could he buy more time? “I will not be going anywhere.”

“No,” Obito darkly agreed. “Not if I don’t make you.”

Somehow, Hiruzen managed not to be blindsided by Obito’s next opening strike.

Their fight devolved into a repetitive, painful slog of punches, kicks, and jumping while running back and forth to throw more punches and kicks. Obito was much less formidable without sharingan, alas that Hiruzen was still weaker in his sorry state!

“Finally out of tricks, old man?” Obito mocked when it became all too clear he was the only one with unlimited stamina. “Where are your fabled one thousand jutsu?”

More harm than good when fighting an unlimited chakra regenerator. Hiruzen used Tsunade’s explosive strength to counter a direct hit and locked Obito in place. He formed the handseal for the suicide jutsu he’d used earlier, then cast instead a stone pillar jutsu with his foot when the enemy fell for it. It blew Obito’s retreating form away from an angle bad enough to break his legs.

It only gained Hiruzen several seconds, barely enough to assemble a fake hand out of pebbles bound in blood and puppetted by chakra threads. He lost the next taijutsu exchange due to Obito’s sheer relentlessness, but at least now he had both hands to cast things with again. He waited for Obito to grab him, then used the strongest kai outflow he could.

To his great and far too belated vindication, it worked as he hoped and prevented Obito from latching onto his chakra and make the shift out of Kamui.

“Naughty – naughty boy,” Hiruzen panted during the next lull. “You’re not – getting out of this – like that anymore, you’ll – have to kill me.”

“I will.”

The Sea of Trees erosion returned with a vengeance.

By the end of it, Hiruzen wasn’t entirely sure how he’d survived without losing another limb.

Curse you, Danzo, Hiruzen thought as his knees buckled under him on the last landing. If only I hadn’t needed so much chakra to re-seal your accursed bioweapon.

The Jar of Poison Technique was just a fancy name for a ball of nano-sized bugs that the Aburame Clan had never managed to master. The technique spread faster than the quickest air release, and at nanoscale even solid matter couldn’t stop them long. Maybe solid rock would slow them, but not the edges, no matter how tightly pressed. They spread much faster than earth techniques would have formed regardless. Even in death you ruin everything I fight for, Danzo.

“What do my eyes see?” Obito’s voice asked idly as he hopped every which way, from one tree to the next, unseen. “Such a resentful look, Lord Third! Could it be you’re finally starting to regret your mistakes?”

“I am rethinking just one of my choices,” grunted Sarutobi. But the more he thought, the more he decided he did the best he could do in the moment, when Obito deployed the Jar of Poison. An elemental bubble had been the only way quick enough, air and fire in a sphere to contain the spread through before the fuuin snapped into place. The Hokage guards wouldn’t have managed the combo technique without orders, certainly not in time.

Even if Sarutobi had somehow been able to stop time and relay the right orders, they’d have needed all the advanced forewarning just to envelop the jar in elemental layers before the lid came off. But would Obito see that? “Since I’d already wasted my lifespan on shadow clones, I could have eschewed the multi-technique resealing combination and used the Four-Violet Flames formation.”

“Amazing,” Obito’s voice mocked disingenuously. “A Hokage of Konoha, admitting failure! I never thought I’d see the day!”

It’s all just confirmation bias after all, Hiruzen thought with vindication he didn’t relish. “You still can’t see underneath the underneath.”

Obito’s chakra churned angrily at the familiar insult.

That Hiruzen was able to block the next strike without his bones breaking spoke to the enemy’s lapse in control. “Struck a nerve, did I?”

“The best,” Obito growled, narrowly failing to land a fatal hit on Hiruzen during the next exchange.

“The Four – Violet Flames – could have worked,” Hiruzen panted, taking his own turn to hide among the leaves and throw his voice this time. Whatever Obito’s other abilities, it seemed that oversaturating the environment with his own chakra worked against his sensor powers. “If I had been willing to sacrifice Raidō, Genma and Iwashi.”

“Sentimentality!” Obito scoffed from below. “All this dross about the Will of Fire, how can you live so long and still not realize that it’s a self-defeating dream?”

“You still don’t see it, do you?” Hiruzen mocked the boy in turn, though most of his attention was on the chakra charge in the air, and how fast it dissipated. “The casting time of the Four Violet Flames formation is not a trifle, much longer to set up than even the slowest earth wall technique. And then the casters would have been vulnerable to any earth moving technique or attack that worked remotely.”

He had one last idea, but the Dead Demon Consuming Seal took too long to set up. He had the Absolute Darkness illusion jutsu for precisely that reason, but Obito’s sensory powers would overcome it swiftly. Hiruzen would only be speeding his own demise, curses.

“I’d have had to make the barrier big and wide to contain everything, the others would have been caught within for certain. Died horribly, yes. But also wastefully. Tactically, it made more sense to contain the expansion at once and re-do the seal. The multi-element combination was chakra-intensive, but also didn’t take as many pairs of hands. It left my men free to counterattack whatever the new threat might be.”

“And look how well that turned out,” Obito sneered, forming hand seals one after the next.

“Overwhelming power does not change what the right choice is. It just means you’re a brute with more strength than you could possibly have earned.”

The tree he was in split down the middle.

Hiruzen took to jumping and running from one bough to the next as fast as he could. “Even if they did have the means to run containment in my stead, and I engaged you directly from the start, all it would have taken was for you to phase past the barrier with your ridiculous technique and pick them off. Then we’d all have died when the technique failed and the insects escaped!”

“Even now you keep trying to twist everything!” Obito roared in anger, dropping an impaling spear tree right from above this time. “Too bad for you, that doesn’t work on me anymore!”

“I had – enough trouble – casting the vacuum bubble,” Hiruzen rasped as he held the attack back with a rock dome jutsu. “At least without activating the celestial gates.”

“Go ahead,” Obito goaded, locking kunai with Hiruzen in a failed bid to gouge his other eye. “Do it. Try it.”

Alas, Hiruzen had already used that technique too much in his life, and was far too old for it now regardless. It was a bluff, and they both knew it. “Tell me, Obito, who sunk his claws into you? What moon did they promise?!” At this point, it was all about buying time. “Did they tell you about the monster sealed inside? Or perhaps you’re fallen so low that you yourself would see the whole world devoured!”

“That’s right,” Obito’s agreement came from his left, so Hiruzen blocked the attack from his right and took two hits in order to sneak a pair of seal tags on the real enemy, damned wooden clones!

“Earth Flow Spears,” Hiruzen panted, the earth around him erupting in sharp spikes to knock the other back, and his copies. “Kai,” he wheezed. Explosions engulfed all of Obito’s clones, and the original’s right leg. “Hah!” He gasped, pointing his fingers to the last tag. It engulfed Obito’s head in explosive fire and sent him falling to the right and away.

Hiruzen would have followed through, but his legs failed him. His knees folded and the Third Hokage sunk down, wheezing and sweating rivers. His arms shook, his legs couldn’t support him, his stomach felt like it was being stabbed inside out, he was losing blood from more than just the too fresh stump, his hand of bloody stone was chipping and dripping, and his whole body – it burned from chakra overuse.

Down below, Obito climbed up from the heap he’d fallen in, because his head hadn’t been blown off. His leg had been, but tendrils of wood extended from the upper third to absorb it back. It regrew even as Hiruzen watched.

“Lord Hashirama would never have produced someone like you,” Hiruzen said with grim resignation. His vision was blurring. And worse. “And I know it couldn’t have been Orochimaru, not back then after Kanabi bridge. That just leaves Uchiha Madara, may all the spirits curse him. Even in death he won’t let us have a moment’s peace.”

“It’s truly unfortunate for you,” Obito said as he approached with kunai bared. “Had you not been so stubborn, you would have finally had peace-“

Everything displaced suddenly, and Hiruzen’s consciousness finally left him with the vague afterimage of yellow hair. If he was seeing Minato now, he must clearly be already dead.

He let go.

He came awake to the sight of Doctor Hirano, impaired depth perception, far too real pain, and and the unpleasant feeling of norepinephrine erupting through his brain with all the gracelesness of field medical ninjutsu.

He was still in Kamui.

But he didn’t believe it. Not at first, because he was surrounded by a Four Violet Flame barrier maintained by four clones. Wood clones.

Of Namikaze Minato.

“Obito, there’s no reason to do this, any of this!” the voice of Hatake Kakashi came, intersped with the grunts and pauses of combat, from far off like a dream. “Yes, it was my hand that killed Rin, but it wasn’t murder, it was suicide! She-”

“If you think I’m doing all this over just you and Rin…” Obito’s voice replied disdainfully. “To call you mistaken would be a massive understatement!”

The sounds of renewed combat reached Hiruzen again, but he couldn’t look away from the face of Minato. Faces of Minato. He blinked. The mirage didn’t go away. Four times over.

Suddenly, the Third Hokage began to laugh. There was only one person brazen enough to achieve this absurdity. Even this absurdity.

Of course that man would do even this, what else besides infringing on the gods’ own realms is even left?!

“Then why-“ Kakashi tried again-

“I already know!” Obito barked. “Everything. That she chose to die. She decided to die at the hands of someone she loved, to protect the Hidden Leaf. No matter what words you say to me, the you who could not protect Rin is an imposter. A fake! As far as I’m concerned, Rin is someone not meant to die. So the dead Rin is also an imposter!”

Is it all just insanity after all? The thought scurried across Hiruzen’s brain even as he couldn’t stop laughing. What a disappointing defeat!

“Rin would never have wanted this for you!”

“Don’t pretend to know Rin, you didn’t know anyone back then, Kakashi. Don’t erase the memories of her now, and don’t pretend you care about anything else! You waste hours away every day in front of the memorial stone out there! Yes, I know! And I understand too. Rin sacrificed herself to protect the village. You can try all you want to fill it with delusions, but that hole in your heart won’t go away!”

Closure is a thing, the rebuttal snailed its way across Hiruzen’s mind in Masanari’s voice.

“The shinobi system, the Village, Konoha itself, they led to this! I don’t care what numbers and statistics that idealistic fool tries to sell, the shinobi themselves created these circumstances. What caused me to despair is this world itself. This counterfeit world! Even that fool Masanari agrees with me, no matter what delusions he plays at. His entire suffering is because he no longer has room for loved ones in his heart! It’s all full, filled with the dead!”

Dead that you-

“Dead that you caused him!” Kakashi said what Hiruzen was thinking.

“Kakashi,” Obito said sadly. Genuinely. “What are you even trying to appeal to here? There is nothing in my heart. I don’t feel pain any longer. There’s no need for me to feel guilty, and there’s no need for you to feel guilty either. The yawning hole in our hearts was opened by this world of hell. I only had pain inside here before, but then I asked myself – what’s the meaning in that? So I abandoned it all.”

Hiruzen’s laughter finally stopped, if only because his breaths finally lagged too far behind.

“Out of all of us, I’m the only one not suffering. Not at Rin’s grave, nor mine, not in front of the memorial stone on the meadow. Not like you. And yes, even Masanari – do you think he’d have done all he has if he wasn’t seeking death himself? His only problem was that he wouldn’t face the truth until me. Now he has to! Now he understands a bit of my despair.”

“…The Obito I knew was not this selfish.”

Obito laughed disdainfully. "If not me it would have been someone else. In the ninja world, those who break the rules and laws are regarded as scum, but those who would abandon even one of their friends are even worse than scum. Well, I'm scum anyway, so I may as well keep breaking the rules.”

The Third Hokage sought the eyes of the Fourth. He didn’t find them. All four clones had them closed. “… Is this permanent?”

“The clones no, the original, yes,” the reply came from Hiruzen’s blind spot. In the voice of Uchih Itachi. Hiruzen had failed to scan his surrounding properly, so utterly was he spent.

Combat resumed. Looking past the impossible sight of Minato’s silent duplicates, Sarutobi saw a fifth Minato watching Kakashi battle Obito hand-to-hand.

“Beg pardon, Hiruzen, but I’ll be refocusing all my attention on the fight,” one of the clones, still not opening its eyes. “Wood clones are superior to shadow clones in all ways except one – they can become distracting in great numbers due to the open link to the original. I’ve not mastered the jutsu beyond this stage. I’ll be locking the chakra flow to the barrier jutsu but otherwise tuning them out. Itachi here will bring you up to speed.”

“Lord Third,” Itachi acknowledged from across him.

Hiruzen made to get up, but the doctor’s hand on his chest dissuaded him. He grunted. “Report, shinobi.”

Itachi reported.

And so, the Third Hokage of the Village Hidden in the Leaves learned that the past 24 hours had been even more of a disaster than his wildest fancies. Two different operations against Konoha launched at the same time, neither of which he’d known about beforehand because Konoha’s internal security was apparently awful. Then Obito launched a follow-up ambush after he was repelled the first time.

And then Orochimaru got involved too, because the day couldn’t end without everything in Hiruzen’s past coming back to haunt him. To kidnap Hanzo!

He outright kidnapped the man! Because he felt offended at a civilian surpassing him in every way that mattered – and something about possessing his body, it was madness!

Masanari responded to all this by killing the snake Sannin. Somehow. A somehow which involved creating a colossal thousand-armed statue like something straight out of Hashirama’s time, though Itachi only knew of that third-hand. It wasn’t enough to have the most ridiculous biology known to man, apparently. Masanari Hanzo just had to acquire mokuton as well. And whatever else. That incorrigible man was collecting bloodline limits like Naruto did spiders.

And now Konoha was in complete disarray. So much so that everyone was desperate enough to let Masanari try and bring the Fourth Hokage back from the dead. Because he could do that too, now. Try and succeed! He could construct bodies wholesale, and the Uzumaki clan had a way to free people from the belly of their Shinigami that Hiruzen had never known!

“Here, Lord Third,” Itachi finished his report by holding out a large scroll. “A package that Lord Hanzo arranged to be delivered straight to you in case anything ever happened to him. Lord Fourth decided a coma qualified.”

He’s not been ennobled yet, Hiruzen groused on the inside. He turned his head to eye the scroll from where he lay. Reached out to touch it. Pulsed his chakra through it. “This is not the original.”

“Lord Fourth also decided sentimentality was no excuse to take unnecessary chances.”

“That sounds more like him, but he has more important things to do than play delivery man.”

“It was my understanding that Hanzo used his ‘one-time ANBU hotline pass’ for this, as he calls it.”

Ah. “Minato should still have checked the contents, at least.” The scroll didn’t seem like it had been activated before, though being a copy it might not have carried over all the signs.

“I decided the contingency was made far enough ago that the contents are likely not actionable to the current crisis,” one of Minato’s clones answered then, not opening its eyes. Not completely tuned out then. “Also, the contents were marked specifically for you. He earned at least this much.”

“I suppose he has.” Hiruzen shamefully failed to manipulate the scroll one-handed in his sorry state, and let Itachi spread it at an angle for him to read. “Oh…” It was the ‘rifle.’ And what looked like notebooks and binders with schematics and descriptions for other things. “False alarm.”

“Lord Hokage?”

“Hanzo has been working on many things, but of course I did not let anything pass without close investigation. Especially his weapons. I had Shisui deliver this to me for testing the moment Masanari first left his house, after he finished the prototype.” Hiruzen activated the seal, causing the scroll to release a waft of smoke, and with it the ‘sniper rifle.’ “Unfortunately, though replicating a c-rank technique without chakra is admittedly impressive, the weapon is oversized, ungainly, requires an unacceptable time stationary to aim, and is as loud as the kyuubi on a rampage at midday.”

Itachi hummed, though Hiruzen didn’t miss the flash of vindication on his face. “May I?” The young man asked, gesturing at the second scroll layered with the first, titled ‘User Manual – Read This First!’

“Go ahead.”

Itachi’s sharingan speed-read the contents in seconds. “… I can see how this could be dangerous.” He could? “The drawbacks are considerable, but only if you miss the initial shot. Noise wouldn’t matter when the projectile outruns sound itself. Unless one happens to be looking right at the wielder before the shot is fired, there would be no way to react.”

Wait, what?

“The skill threshold is very low as well, at least in terms of training. Much faster to acquire than any of the existing shinobi tools, if the claims here are genuine.”

Hiruzen blinked. Then frowned. He motioned for Itachi to show him the writing. Soon, he was forced to reconsider his initial judgment. There was, it turned out, more than enough reason why holding and shooting that monstrosity had felt so satisfying. Not at first, but when he finally learned its quirks and mastered the recoil enough to hit the bullseye consistently… But...

No.

There was clearly a mistake in those numbers, no possible chance that range was real, there was no way-

Mizudeppo no Jutsu! Came the memory of past wars.

“The Second Mizukage was a lesson we all failed to learn, wasn’t he?” The Third briefly closed his eyes in chagrin. “Gengetsu Hōzuki and his Water Gun were the bane of the battlefield back then.”

“… Perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing,” Itachi said cautiously. “There was still a threshold of skill there, at least.”

And now there isn’t, Hiruzen thought grimly, his eyes arrested by two words.

Supersonic speed.

There was no shinobi or weapon that moved as fast as sound. Only sound techniques did so, and only some lightning techniques were faster. Of them all, only a handful of the latter aimed for harm over debilitation, and none were lethal without long casting time and a tremendous chakra cost. A ninja…

An elite nin might be able to react on being hit to mitigate damage from a jutsu or weapon that already landed. Partially. But that still wasn’t fast-as-sound speed, never mind better.

Kakashi did split a bolt of lightning with Raikiri, Hiruzen told himself.

But no, that was a feat of planning more than speed. He’d deliberately set up next to a lightning rod, and used the Sharingan to time his strike according to the rumbling flashes in the cloud. The bolt had been one of those thick, repeating lingering ones as well.

Not even the Raikage could reach the sound barrier, never mind break it despite his too great boasts, and he could outsprint the fastest knife and arrow. The only reason Minato was faster was because he literally teleported, and even then his reaction time was limited to whatever time dilation his Hiraishin managed to achieve. And that was based on the Hyuuga eight trigram skills, which themselves had never caused a sonic boom in the entirety of shinobi history.

The Third Hokage painfully dragged his good arm up to palm his face. “I’m the most arrogant fool that every lived.”

The dark dimension was tensely awkward as Hirano and Uchiha both failed to decide, if they were allowed to reassure the Hokage when the only way to do so was to disagree with him. 

Hiraishin is still faster, Hiruzen tried to reassure himself.

… But did that really matter? When the projectile hit before sound did, you had nothing to react to. It didn’t matter how fast you were if the attack was faster than the environment your senses relied on. You had to see the shot being lined up ahead of time and dodge away from where the foe was pointing, but that applied to everything in a fight. Even then, good enough hearing could at least pick up a kunai or shuriken flying, even as their range simply did not compare.

Hiruzen’s emotional crisis was abruptly halted by the sound of a thousand screeching birds.

Sarutobi Hiruzen motioned for Itachi to help him sit up, despite Hirano’s protests. His head swam, but when it cleared, he saw that Kakashi had managed to drive the Raikiri through Obito’s chest.

Everyone had stopped, seemingly surprised at the result of the fight.

Kakashi pulled out and jumped away, landing in a tense crouch.

“There is no such thing as peace in this world, Kakashi.” Obito said. With a giant hole in his chest. A fist-sized gap going right through from front to back, he was even missing the spine. But he could still speak. He didn’t cough, didn’t choke, didn’t fall. He didn’t even wheeze.

He just stood there, still speaking. “Reality is like a grand river, no matter how hard one tries to stop it, it will swallow them whole and mercilessly crush... but there is one way to escape from this suffering, and I’m not going to let anyone stop me from achieving it. If doing that somehow makes me less than a true shinobi, then I’ll just go and crush all of the so-called real shinobi.”

“Is that really all it is?” Minato finally spoke, uttering the first thing since Hiruzen laid eyes on the impossible sight of him again alive. “You think yourself the second coming of the Sage? He dreamed of world peace and stability, not this.”

“What world peace?” Obito spat, not as composed as when it was Kakashi questioning him. “What stability? Only the villages of large nations are showered in light, leaving the smaller countries in their shadow, dying. Wherever light strikes, there will always be shadows.”

“Not if the light is strong enough.”

“Don’t give me technicalities! So as long as there is a concept of victors... the vanquished will also similarly exist. You, Sensei, and all the other Hokage, you’ve always done this. Your selfish intent of wanting to preserve peace is the very thing that initiates wars. Then hatred is born to protect love. These are all nexuses, causal relationships that can't be separated. But a world of just victors, peace and love... such a world can be created too.”

“In a delusion,” Minato said calmly. “Delusion and dream. The sort that justifies none of your actions against anyone else. If your solution is the false comfort of make-believe, that’s something you could easily have granted yourself a long time ago. You could have simply trapped yourself in a genjutsu until you wasted away. That’s precisely your plan after all. Don’t pretend you’re doing the world a favor by forcing the same on everyone else. That’s not peace, it’s the pettiness of the mean-spirited.”

For some reason, those words seemed to strike Obito like a physical blow. “Unbelievable, that lunatic even got to you.”

“He revealed many things to me. Though seeing as he actually succeeded in the second third of Madara’s plan, and had the good sense to completely ruin the last third that Madara himself didn’t know about, you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t have much good to say about the first.”

“… What are you saying?” 

“Project Tsuki No Me,” Minato’s tone was hard now, as were his eyes. “Madara’s Rinnegan. Uzumaki Nagato. Akatsuki. The Infinite Tsukuyomi. And everything else too, the Ten-Tails, the Shinju, Black Zetsu and his plan to sacrifice the whole lot of you to bring back Kaguya. I know.”

“… You should not have said that, Minato-sensei,” Obito said lowly, his form beginning to crumble and fall apart – he’d replaced himself with another fake at some point in the fight! Or just now, during his speech! “Knowing someone else knows my plans makes me antsy to move things faster. What comes next will be on your head and no one else.”

The fake Obito flaked away.

All the while, Minato just stood and watched. Even he, ‘more powerful than ever before’ according to Itachi, even he’d been deceived.

… Or perhaps he chose to let his student go?

No, heavens please, don’t let even Minato make my same mista-

“Sixty-Four Hexagrams: Distinguishing Heavenly Edicts!”

Reality warped like molten glass struck by a blower’s staff.

“First Edict – The Central Master Orders Heaven and Earth.” Hyuuga Hiashi’s voice came from somewhere and everywhere.

The world was a looking glass that cracked like a broken mirror, and for a moment Sarutobi Hiruzen was as fractured as the two realities on both ends of Kamui.

Between one blink and the next, he experienced an echo of what Obito would have experienced if he’d finished escaping out to the living world.

Hiruzen fell back to the ground, feeling like every muscle and bone was trying to shake loose from the rest. He’d just witnessed and suffered an echo of what Obito would have experienced in the next six minutes and change. Hiashi – the Hyuuga – they had a technique that could do – what?

Time contraction? Hiruzen struggled to think as he pulled himself together, it – he was… Hiashi had just – Space-Time taijutsu. But instead of dilating time, it accelerated it? No, condensed the future it into a single moment.

Obito’s ravaged form smashed through, up and out of the stone block pillar some way to the right, trailing dust and blood. He made no move to recover, or anything else. He just flew like a ragdoll, and fell the same way. It was the luck of the damned that he didn’t break his neck when he crashed in the heap left behind by his own prior acts of random destruction. He didn’t fall down into the void either, more’s the pity.

Obito… he succeeded in escaping – would have succeeded, Hiruzen tried to make sense of what he’d just seen of the future that would have been. But wherever he exited…

Jiraiya was there, with Ma and Pa toad, and Enma too. Jiraiya had some sort of barrier seals that disrupted Obito’s intangibility, then used senjutsu and supersensory techniques to keep constant track of him when he tried to flee. Tenzo too was there somewhere, all over the place spreading additional barriers in Obito’s escape paths.

Whenever Obito escaped entrapment and successfully went intangible or tried to teleport, Kakashi or Minato would attack on this side. Every time he was disrupted in the real world, Jiraiya was there with a kick or a punch. All the while, Ma and Pa kept bombarding him with their genjutsu song, their jutsu completely unaffected by all the dimensional knavery.

Finally, Obito resorted again – would have resorted – to large-scale destruction in a last, desperate bid to get away.

That was when Enma descended upon him in all his fury and pummelled him a hundred times in the space of seven heartbeats, with the Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod grown to the length of a full mountain. Obito’s scrambled wits would only catch up to him and tell him it was safer on this side of Kamui when he was nearly in the stratosphere.

Obito couldn’t teleport and be intangible at the same time. He almost didn’t survive the Monkey King’s last attack.

Hiashi made him experience all of that in an instant, Hiruzen thought dimly. Incredulously. Where – how – did the Hyuuga have this absurd ability this whole time? The target’s immediate future imposed inescapably on reality through Yin-to-Yin contact, an attack that struck the target in all dimensions simultaneously to inflict all possible harm at once. Even from sources other than the caster! Such a technique – it skirted the boundary of Yin-Yang release to inflict the complete inverse of Izanagi! What a dangerous, utterly brazen secret!

Ahead in the distance, Minato and Kakashi were both kneeling from having been so much closer to the backlash. Next to Hiruzen, Doctor Hirano was unconscious. Itachi wasn’t, but just barely. Vaguely, Sarutobi noticed that Minato’s wood clones were laid out on the ground now too, looking dead and no longer maintaining the barrier around the three of them. The jutsu rebound had disrupted them too, even at that distance, it was a partial jutsu miscast and it still achieved so much, what an absurd technique!

“That – was an experience,” Itachi groaned next to him, trying and finally succeeding to stand after the fourth try. “By your leave, Lord Third, I’ll go do my part as assigned by the Fourth.”

The Third Hokage felt his world nearly stop.

No. They can’t still mean to spare him, surely?

But the farther Itachi walked from him, the quieter the tableau ahead seemed. The more he watched, the more he saw Minato and Kakashi not finish off the enemy. There were zipwires, cuffs, seals and more seals, but no finishing blow.

He sat frozen in indecision up until Uchiha Itachi knelt next to Uchiha Obito, pried open his stolen eye, and used his own, new special doujutsu. Reality intruded on Hiruzen’s thoughts with callous viciousness. Itachi had gained that strength because he’d just lost both his parents. 

There’s still a way to dodge, the realization dawned on him out of nowhere. Killing intent. Any ninja worth their name will feel it, even when it’s not aimed specifically at them.

Sarutobi Hiruzen drew the seal of a sound-blocking barrier in his own blood, picked up the rifle, loaded it with the ammunition thoughtfully provided, aimed at the scuff mark one meter behind the target, and pulled the trigger just as the barrier went up.

Conveniently, the scope needed a single eye to aim.

The bullet smashed through Obito’s left temple and splattered half the skull and brain on the way out.

Itachi flinched. Kakashi too. Neither of them had the slightest warning. Minato alone had the self-possession grab and flash the both of them away. Hiruzen thought that was it, but all three stopped with their backs to him. They assumed it had been a suicide technique. Or a cursed seal implanted in him by his malefactor.

Sarutobi Hiruzen reloaded, lined a second shot, and pulled the trigger again.

He was aiming for the heart this time, but the angle didn’t match well. The bullet went through the throat instead and nearly ripped the head off with the spine.

This time Minato felt the disturbance in the air, the bullet passed fairly close to them compared to the first. He finally whirled around and saw what had really happened. Too late. Because there had been no sound to warn, and no killing intent.

The Fourth Hokage was suddenly in front of the Third, grim and crouched low to catch his one-eyed gaze. “Why?”

The gun clattered hollowly on the ground as Hiruzen exhausted his last burst of strength. He fell on his back, feeling like instead of Kamui he was sinking through Yomi’s own dark haze. “No more mistakes.”

“… And if this was the mistake?”

This is why Naruto likes me more than you. “Then let it be mine.”

Minato’s return should have been a joyous miracle, but now that they finally had their reunion, there was only the dark and the cold. The dark, the cold, and a thin, wispy trail of muzzle smoke.

In the end, it had been easy to not want to kill Minato’s tortured student.

Even after everything, this was all that was left at the end of the world he made.

In the end, even after everything, all three of the kindest men he’d ever known lived long enough to become the same thing.

Hard, ruthless killers.