Chapter 34: Kaleidoscope

  I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,

  The unending sky, with all its million suns

  Which turn their planets everlastingly

  In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.

  If I could sail that nothing, I should cross

  Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing;

  Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss

  Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,

  And rage into a sun with wandering planets,

  And drop behind; and then, as I proceed,

  See his last light upon his last moon’s granites

  Die to a dark that would be night indeed:

  Night where my soul might sail a million years

  In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.

  - John Masefield

  The Kaleidoscope turned. Its ringed sections spun at variable speed. It burned with light; energy coursed through it. The arda within blazed as it tumbled, a confluence of science and magic and something else, strangely silent. It turned, and its turning was like a key in the mechanism of a vast lock, and the lock was made of all the stars in the sky. It blazed, and its light reflected the rings of Infernus, and the comet Solesta, and it even contained the darkness of the Voidlight.

  Well. No need to get overdramatic about it. This is the Apocalypse Machine after all, ushering in a Revelation. And you already know what that means.

  *

  Far away, in the darkness between Infernus and the outer wilds, the King’s Comet, called Solesta, burst apart into a cloud of particulates. In a single instant, its vast agglomeration of arda dissolved into nothing, became no more than a nebulous sea of crystalline ephemera dispersing into the void.

  The light of the explosion, cold and pale and brilliant, lit the nighttime side of Infernus as though with floodlights.

  The shockwave from the blast swept away the ring system of Infernus and threw it down through the atmosphere in a cataclysmic feat of destruction that rendered Solesta’s previous sojourn past Infernus trivial by comparison.

  The shockwave struck the atmosphere of Infernus not with physical force but with an energy that resolved itself into auroral sweeps as vicious as those previously found only in Angalaland.

  As the skies rained fire and light, and the nighttime side of the planet was brighter than the day, no creature doubted that this was the end of the world at last.

  *

  The mother stone, cold and dark as the beast it held at bay, and equally angry, was cleaved apart in an instant. Tied to Solesta by bonds of fate, the death of the dream of the Grim King was the death of its wardstone. The dying shriek of the mother stone made all the earth tremble; it triggered earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, and a great upheaval of the dry coral forests of Prax. Every brown daimon planetside inherited a debilitating migraine, except for those whose mental faculties were clouded with crystal crush.

  *

  The Grim King closed swiftly now on his target. He seethed with an unspeakable mass of emotions: rage and pain at the death of his comet; glee and thrill at the death of his wardstone; pleasure at the thought of gaining a key, another key, and of leaving this place; regret, even now, for what he had done; trepidation, even now, for what he intended to do; horror, even now, at what he had become. But of hope, and of joy, and of mercy, he had none.

  The Grim King sensed his tool, there on the planet. He sensed himself there, just as he saw the seeds and heard the whispered echoes of all the departed gods.

  Memories trailed after him in the dark like the tail of his own miserable comet. All of this had been before. He intended to stop it, so that it could never be again.

  *

  The Iterators watched with interest. Their comm channels flooded with data as they shared such measurements as they remained capable of recording. In a matter of seconds, they knew more, collectively, about what was happening and what was going to happen in the immediate future than any other being in existence.

  They did not particularly care.

  No Significant Alteration was privy to data that the other Iterators lacked. He distributed it freely: that the one who had built and activated the doomsday device, that black daimon living in the corpse of their sibling Nonpareil Nescience, had once resided in a temporal stasis chamber in No Significant Alteration’s very self. That this daimon had been awakened by a white and green. That the white had been sent to do so by the dragons, likely in anticipation of this very outcome.

  Curious.

  The Iterators, to whom the daimon were insects to be studied and analyzed with mild interest, conferred among themselves. They proposed theories, shared data, and concluded that the ten daimon of interest intended to enter the dream world with the aid of the sentient trans-dimensional warp gates that had recently arrived via Solesta. Such a transition would now be possible thanks to the destruction of Solesta weakening the dimensional boundaries.

  No Significant Alteration, in the midst of formulating a proposition on how they might aid these ten, merely for the sake of curiosity, was clipped by a particularly large meteorite of arda. Fallen from the ring system, the powerful auroral sweeps had supercharged its energy. The force of impact, and the subsequent explosive release of energy, destroyed No Significant Alteration entirely.

  At last, it thought as the blast consumed its processing grid.

  Lucky, thought the other Iterators.

  *

  Ma’turin’s eyes were heavily crusted with barnacles, with coral and sediment and all manner of sedentary creatures. For the first time in uncounted millennia, the great turtle’s eyelids twitched.

  As the depths churned from the recoiling of the earth, and as his last fitful nightmares formed themselves into monsters of the deep, Ma’Turin began to awaken. One of his flippers, on which had grown a small mountain of stone and sand, trembled. Deep within the shell, his great heart beat faster. His lungs trembled. How long could a turtle remain underwater without needing to breathe? Ma’turin felt it now, after all these millennia: the impulse, the urge, the necessity of breath. Air. The surface. He needed it.

  He moved bit by bit. Slowly he shook; gradually he broke free from the geology that had formed around his dormant body.

  The bell-ringers on his back experienced such a thrill and a terror as they never had before. This was it. The time was coming for which they had waited all their lives—and not only they, but all who had come before in an unbroken chain since the beginning of time. Even the Speaker trembled, for it had come much sooner than she had thought.

  They rushed to prepare. They organized themselves. They readied the bells. But every one of them secretly wondered, secretly feared: what about the ice?

  *

  The exploding, coruscating light of the atmosphere on the nighttime side of Infernus reflected a twin image in the cold, wet eyes of the forvalaca.

  She remembered a time when such a sight might have pleased her, but now she experienced only anger and pain. Her tail flicked back and forth, shedding tongues of freezing flame. She crouched beside a huge metal capsule in an open space, inside an island of metal that fell unceasingly in circles around the world she knew. She hated it here, but she could not leave. She wanted to crush and freeze and destroy the cruel little beasts that had put her here. They scurried past, made a wide arc around her and her capsule, afraid. Yet she could not hurt them. She could not do as she pleased, for they had caged her with nothing more than a metal collar.

  The forvalaca turned her eyes away from the light of the planet into the darkness and stars in the other direction. She sensed something out there. With neither sight nor scent, but by some hidden, secret means, she knew it was there. A mighty one. A powerful, dangerous one. One she had hunted before, had caught before. The memory stirred primal desires within her.

  Yet she could do nothing. Not now. Not yet. But she would outlast these puny daimon and their cold machines. She would not be caged forever. Soon she would hunt again.

  Soon.

  *

  Somewhere on the Local Docking Network, the Remnant trained their weapons on a mysterious vessel, a small personal transport with blackened cockpit windows that had parked in an empty docking bay. A distress signal had prevented them from shooting it out of the sky. Why destroy a potential asset? Both the vessel and its occupants could be scavenged.

  They closed in on the transport, seeing no mounted defense weaponry. They ordered the occupants to disembark for processing. They shifted on the brightly lit white tiling of the docking bay when the ramp lowered. But no one descended.

  Instead, something burst through the hull of the vessel. It tore the carbon-alloy plating like rice paper and bowled over the guards there, scattering them like pins. This monster thundered, crackled with electricity, and it was the work of but a few swift and brutal moments for it to send the Remnant fleeing in disarray. Techsuits crumpled like tin cans under his adamant gauntlets; blinding arcs of lightning connected him to his enemies; he tore them apart, crushed them, broke them. His eyes and his arda crackled yellow. The noise was immense. A white tiger appeared and reappeared, disrupting any retaliatory fire against the yellow monster. The Remnant wondered if, perhaps, they had missed one of the great beasts after all.

  Rasmus ran, for time was short and he must free the angels. He did not bother with taking any doors; he made his own doors.

  Behind him, like a frightened little frog, followed Fiora. Guarded by an eyeless white tiger, she fled dazed and horrified through the wreckage in Rasmus’s wake. She tried to close her eyes and her ears to the wounded, to their cries of pain and pleas for help, but she could not. There was, after all, nothing else, no other life here; just a blank void in her mind with a scattering of colored stars around her, many of them dying.

  She saw one daimon, a high-ranking officer, female and yellow, who lay near death where Rasmus had smashed her against a wall. The fight and ferocity had gone out of her eyes. She was crying, unable to move, able only to lie there and slowly die. When she died, a bomb would go off inside her head so that she would not turn into a voidbound.

  Fiora halted in front of this daimon. Green tears flowed down her cheeks. She knelt in front of the wounded Remnant officer, ignoring the tiger’s nuzzling urges for her to continue. She checked the wound. She checked for weapons, because she knew that the yellow might try something even on someone saving her life. Fiora found no weapons, but she did find an officer’s passcard, and she took it. Fiora made a knife appear and added another long scar to the collection on her left forearm. She healed the yellow. Not entirely, but enough that she would live.

  “Please tell your people not to fight Rasmus,” Fiora begged her, tears in her eyes. Then she stood and hopped through the nearby hole which Rasmus had torn through the wall.

  She caught up with Rasmus a minute later in a big white room with windows all over the ceiling and walls. The fading radiance of Solesta’s explosion glimmered overhead, and the storm of colors swirled like intricate watercolor paints all over the surface of Infernus off to one side. Some of the windows were cracked.

  The room had been a hub for passengers and travelers. It was full of screens that would have displayed arrivals and departures, schedules and maintenance and atmospheric conditions and echo-wave cooldowns and many other things that neither Rasmus nor Fiora understood. The room was full of benches, chairs, rows of computers and comm-relay devices. It once would have been alive and bustling. Now this room was empty, its contents wrecked by the Remnant.

  Against one wall sat a huge boxy capsule, metallic and ominous, clearly not part of the original décor. Scaffolding and scraps of metal surrounded it as though it had been constructed on the spot, and recently.

  The forvalaca crouched beside this object, watching them with cold, bright eyes. She was as large as the enormous tank which she guarded. She looked strange to Fiora under the twin bright lights of Solesta and the hub’s fluorescents. A creature such as that belonged in the darkness, where she could stalk her prey. Her long, dark, furry body was coiled, ready to spring.

  Fiora could hear Rasmus thinking; he made a deep, impatient humming noise as he considered. She sensed the urgency crackling around him just like his lightning. They didn’t have much time.

  “Rasmus,” she said. Then, louder, “Rasmus!”

  He turned to look at her out of his peripheral vision. He did not remove his gaze from the forvalaca. That beast was also growing impatient.

  “Rasmus,” she said, “you worry about getting the angels out! Leave the forvalaca to me.”

  He frowned. His emotions rode open on his expression as always: confusion, doubt. In the mind of Rasmus, there was no question that the forvalaca would slay Fiora immediately in any fight. But here was the puzzlement: Fiora did not fight, not ever.

  “Trust me, Rasmus!”

  Time ticked away. At last, Rasmus nodded. He knew that Fiora was no child, helpless and na?ve. He had known since Prax. And perhaps, in a way that he did not understand, for he was a fool, as Derxis said, this little frog could contend with a monster.

  “Take the angel,” he said. Fiora and the tiger disappeared in a flash of light as Rasmus charged at the containment unit. He did the foolish thing, the thing that should not be done: he paid the forvalaca no heed. He had but one goal, and his godshatter shouted at him that time was nearly out.

  *

  SADs dropped from the sky over Jeronimy’s mountain, three of them. Jeronimy could not guess what it was that they intended to accomplish. Too late to stop the Kaleidoscope. It had done its work in the blink of an eye. No more Solesta.

  Yet they came, drilling through the folding lights of the raging sweeps, blasting meteoric debris as they punched down from the raging heights. They parked themselves over the husk of Nonpareil Nescience, shedding squads of strike teams like nefarious fleas. One of the SADs was struck by a falling chunk of arda too large for the deflector shielding. The explosion tore a gaping hole in the hull and disrupted the stabilizing jets. The SAD, like a giant elongated top, slowly tipped over and tumbled down onto the western slope of the mountain, where it rolled to a halt on the black plains. It would have a horde of voidbound to deal with there.

  As for the rest, Jeronimy watched them from a control room in the depths of the Iterator. The Ephathites came down through the hole in the top of the dead machine. They surrounded the Kaleidoscope but did not seem intent on destroying it.

  Jeronimy could have just left. He knew that. He had his shadow. The breach had been made. Dimensions were aligned or some shit. The point was that he, Jeronimy, could walk right the fuck out. With his angel, his shadow, he could just step through a door and into another world. He could have done it right then and there as he watched the Remnant defile his workplace.

  Something anchored him. Something compelled him. It had to do with the Voidlight. Something was coming; it had spoken to him. He had to see what it was. He had to know.

  Zayana sent him an angry message, something about activating the machine too soon. He ignored it.

  He pulled up a chart on one screen. All the boxes on the right-hand side of the chart were empty. He double-clicked at the top to select the entire column, and with the stroke of a key, he replaced the emptiness with the letter ‘A’ in each of the boxes.

  Elsewhere, over a dozen techsuits in varying stages of completion blinked to life. Their repair units popped open, and out they came. They were smart; he had modeled the AI after an extremely simplified version of an Iterator’s distributed intelligence.

  They took the Remnant entirely by surprise. The Remnant retaliated with their own array of weaponry and tamed monsters. And of course, they had their own techsuits. The difference between his and theirs was one of design-intent. The Remnant had built their robots to fight ordinary foes—soldiers, mercs, etc. Jeronimy had built his robots to fight Rasmus.

  Jeronimy sipped a drink and grinned a wide, toothy grin as he watched the chaos, basking in the carnage and destruction. All his shit was getting fucked up beyond all repair, but it didn’t matter. Something was coming. Just for him. He only had to stay alive until then.

  *

  Direct teleportation across space of any distance was difficult near unto the point of impossibility. Particles disappeared and reappeared elsewhere all the time at the subatomic level, at least insofar as the most delicate instruments of the daimon could determine. Getting them to do this over any great distance, as a cohesive unit, proved unworkable. You could not relocate coherent assemblages of particles across vast distances instantaneously. What you could do, the mysterious ancient creator of the echo drive had discovered long ago, was converge the fabric of spacetime itself such that two locations, for a brief instant, ceased to be separate. Thus, the objects being relocated didn’t technically move at all.

  Even Acarnus did not understand the principles of the echo drive. No one alive did, save the tight-lipped Iterators, unless there was some distant and ancient remainder of the Reachers out amongst the stars. Acarnus did not even know how echoes came into it. Legend said that the basic principles of the device came suddenly to the mysterious creator upon hearing an echo.

  Fortunately, knowledge of how it worked was not requisite to operate an echo drive. Yet it bothered Acarnus even as he hurriedly plugged his goggles into the engine and began transferring data. He always liked to know how things worked. He wanted to know the truth, to understand the ways in which every action and movement that he witnessed was the calculable and theoretically predictable result of natural processes. If he knew how an echo drive worked, then he could build one. He could build a hundred, and if he built them correctly then they would function correctly, and if he built them all identically then they would function exactly alike. No surprises. Predictability. Consistency. Calculability. Logic. These were why he liked machines and computers more than people.

  Except that he had apparently been in love. He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t considered it as an explanation for his lost memories, for the many oddities and discrepancies he had observed over the past six months. It was obvious now, of course. He recalled, with his perfect precision of memory, strange data logs he had seen in his files back at the monastery. A flute, obviously Anthea’s work, lying beside his bed. A record of dozens of games of chess he did not remember playing. The way the others had spoken to him, had looked at him. The mysterious little hints that Akkama could not help but drop into her comments, thinking herself cunning.

  Yes, he saw it all now. Like finding the one line of code that explained everything else, he finally understood. He had simply never expected it. It was the last thing that he would expect from himself. He had been…in love.

  Something had been taken from him, and not by accident. Something critical. Something life-changing. Something the loss of which had gnawed at him and kept him inexplicably up at night for months. He knew what it was now, and he wanted it back. At any cost. He knew of only one way to get something like that—and, indeed, at any cost.

  Distant explosions rumbled through the walls of the Iterator as Acarnus finished transferring the data, the coordinates to a location, extremely specific only because it had to be extremely specific. The echo drive powered up, still functional, most of its core functions in the green. It required an enormous amount of computation to make a jump. In this case, ‘enormous’ was still but a sliver of the Iterator’s potential. Another mystery. What in the world did the Iterators do with all their computational power? And why did this one have three echo drives? And what had it done, when it lived, with the capacity to move itself to any calculable location in the universe?

  The world was full of mysteries. Every one of them bothered Acarnus, but he had other things on his mind at this moment.

  He punched the button.

  *

  Emmius twisted around on top of his angel’s head to watch the three big ships descend on Jeronimy’s mountain. They looked just like the ones that had almost fried him back at Mystrikt. He hoped Jeronimy would be okay. He felt kind-of bad about leaving, but he had something really important to do. He had to check on the mother stone. Nobody else could do that, so it had to be him. That thought gave him determination.

  His angel swerved around brilliant debris that rained from the sky like shards of a shattered sun. They exploded where they hit the ground. It was scary, but not as scary as the auroral sweeps. They surged through the sky like rivers of ethereal paint. The dragon angel took Emmius through one of them, a green and blue curtain that rippled and cracked like a flag in a stiff wind. Emmius felt as though he was being pulled out of his body. His arda burned bright with energy—too much energy. It was horrible, and he was bellowing in pain and confusion when they burst out the other side.

  He wanted it to be over. He wanted to leave, like Zayana said he could with his angel once the Kaleidoscope started. But he had to check first.

  His angel was fast, very fast, and it could also jump around in the sky without moving in between. Soon they were soaring over Prax. Everything was wrong down there. It all looked ablaze with strange fire as the reefs fluoresced in the sweeps. Supercharged arda struck sky dreamers down from the sky; they crashed and shattered on the brilliant coral. He shaded his eyes against the brilliance. He pressed his glowing brown forehead against the warm white scales on top of his angel’s head.

  His angel knew where to go. It coasted low over the dry coral, dodging the worst of the auroras and the exploding arda. Emmius searched for the mother stone amid the upheaving earth, and his eyes somehow found her in all the chaos. She was broken apart into pieces, split from the top like a glossy black orange. She looked like she had been hit with a giant hammer. She was dead, really dead. He could tell that at a glance. And that meant something bad was coming.

  False flesh, said a voice, imperious and frightening. We knew you would come.

  The sudden appearance of the dragons startled both Emmius and his angel. They turned as one, and as one were struck dumb by what they saw.

  A dozen dragons twined beautifully in the air, arrayed in a wide formation. Somehow, they were flying where Emmius’s angel had just flown only a minute before. Where had they come from?

  “Like, whoa!” Emmius adjusted his dragon mask to make sure it sat properly on his face.

  False flesh, said the greatest of the dragons, the one that glittered gold in the un-nighttime sky. Prepare yourself for death. The dragons were not dodging the falling debris. Of course, they did not need to. They were dragons.

  Emmius knew the dragons did not like him. Still, he had never seen so many. And they were so beautiful, and so majestic and cool, that he grinned behind his mask despite their threats. And maybe it was the drugs, or the sweeps, or maybe he had just forgotten that dragons did not lie. Whatever the case, he was not at all prepared when they attacked.

  *

  Frostfound, like all sacred places, looked impossible. The arches and columns, the ribbed walkways, all were as delicate as a spider’s web and as intricate as the most complex of coral. Parts of Frostfound were spiraled like shells; parts were cloven like ice. Yet it was not ice, nor shell, nor glass; it was something beyond all of these. It was something that ice aspired to be. And as Rosma approached, the soaring spires and winding arches gleamed with the light of the sweeps, the light of the falling rings, the light of the end of the world.

  A door opened for her, a dark portal to the forbidden interior. She did not hesitate, though it pained her to move forward. It pained her because every step forward was a step away from Ys, from the great turtle, from the bells. Ma’turin would be awakening now. He would stir, shaking himself from the bottom of the sea. The bell ringers would run in preparation, exhilarated and frightened. It had happened too early. It was happening without her. Everything that Rosma had loved, everything that she had spent her life preparing for, was happening without her.

  But she stepped into the dark portal because she had a job to do. She would try to clear a path for the turtle through the ice. She did not understand how she might accomplish this, but she would try.

  Her angel accompanied her, an ice-white shark. It had followed her through channels in the water outside, but now it had to swim up, out of the water and through the air. It drifted beside her as she entered.

  The interior space of Frostfound was vast; Rosma could tell as much from the faint echoing of the creaks and groans of the ice outside. It was curiously dark. The icy material of the ceiling far above showed the glimmering sky lights outside as through fogged stained-glass windows, yet a darkness hung in the air like a cloud. It was an ancient, dead darkness. Rosma shivered, but not from the cold.

  Lights appeared before her—blue lights, blue arda emitting a frosty glow, held like lanterns by small cloaked creatures. She smelled their damp musk. Foliots.

  They gathered near. They bowed to her. One of them beckoned her with a hand obscured by a pale sleeve much too long for it.

  They led her in procession deeper into the frigid shadows. She caught glimpses of things in the dark: strange things, bright things, but always clouded by the dim fog. Sometimes she heard movement in the distance or sniffed a scent that raised her hackles. Her angel was wary too; it swam quick circles around her, nodding its head back and forth, seeing with its remarkable nose.

  What set her most on edge was the sense of familiarity. Again and again, she almost recognized her surroundings, though she had never been here before.

  The foliots took her to a room lit with dim blue light, blue arda like their lanterns. They circled around a chair and knelt. Not a chair, a throne. A throne of ice, sharp and deadly, vaguely sinister in appearance. A crown of glittering blue arda lay on the seat of the throne.

  That is the crown and arda of the Frozen God. The voice vibrated through the walls, the floor. It came from everywhere, a soft whisper. Rosma readied her spear and backed against a wall.

  They think you are the Frozen God, the voice said. With reason.

  “Where art thou?” she asked.

  Where? Not ‘who?’

  “I care not who.”

  Neither did she. She never gave me a name. I was always ‘the Voice.’ And so. The Voice I remain. The Voice of Frostfound. I am the shadow in these walls, your reflection in the ice. I am the hidden light in this darkness. I am the cold at the heart of the Frozen God. She built this place. But I am this place.

  “Why am I here?”

  I told you. The foliots think you are the Frozen God. They are blind and deaf, but that only means they are free from trivial distractions such as sound and appearance.

  Rosma edged away from the wall, positioned herself in the clearing before the throne.

  Take the crown. It is yours.

  “I bear no desire for it.”

  Then why are you here?

  “The ice. Ma’turin is rising. Ys must come to the surface. The bells must ring.”

  Yes. I had almost forgotten. The bells. I came here to prevent their sounding.

  “They must toll,” said Rosma. She tried to wave her spear menacingly at the ice around her.

  Truly? The Frozen God feared the bells.

  “Truly. What must I do?”

  Frostfound is bound to you.

  “Do not lie to me, Voice. I have never set foot in this place.”

  Yet it is so. Before you fell from the sky, before you existed at all, the Frozen God concerned herself with you. As did I. I knew you would come. I came here for you. For you are she.

  “Let us assume it is so. Thou hast yet to answer my query.”

  If you truly wish to destroy that which is bound to you, which you created, then the method is simple. Destroy yourself.

  Rosma replied with silence and a glare.

  Your key is with you, the Voice said after a moment. You are in no danger. You will awaken in another world. Do you not know this?

  “I know.” Zayana had explained it to her.

  However, I must warn you that, should you pursue this course of action, your affliction will follow your soul.

  “My affliction.”

  The darkness within you is neither natural nor biological. I am sure you are aware of this. It is a gift from the Frozen God.

  “A gift?”

  She hated you.

  Rosma tapped her spear on the ice. The foliots remained still as statues, kneeling around the throne. The crown still glittered there. The Voice was still unseen in the darkness. Rosma thought furiously, ignoring the sudden gnawing pain in her stomach. Kill herself in exchange for the destruction of Frostfound?

  “I cannot trust you,” she said.

  Then you are wiser already than the Frozen God, said the Voice. It was I that killed her, not the Burning God, nor the Shogunate. Yet this much is true: that it is within your power to clear a path for Ma’turin. And you are nearly out of time. Already the great turtle is preparing to rise.

  Rosma shook her head. Ridiculous. A ploy so transparent…

  Yet. She would have to leave this world soon, with her angel, if she expected to live. One way or another, death or no death. And she would not be coming back. It was much too late for her to return to Ys, to ring the bells herself. But she could wager this body, sick and expendable, on a chance. A slim chance, maybe, but a chance. A chance for Ys to rise, for Ma’turin to take his first breath in millennia, for the bells to ring at the end of the world.

  “Such a choice,” she said to herself, “is no choice at all.”

  Spoken like the Frozen God, said the Voice.

  Rosma stabbed herself through the heart; the tooth of the nightmare had slain her after all, though much later than it would have liked. Her angel disappeared in a flash of light at the moment of her death. The Voice uttered a wry joke about justice that no one heard, just before it was silenced forever.

  *

  Emmius cowered against the coral. He watched in horror as the real dragons tore his angel into brilliant little pieces. The cloud-white angel snarled and writhed, but it was helpless when faced with the power and the luck of a dozen gleaming dragons. It died softly, and Emmius felt its loss somewhere deep inside. He had loved that dragon, for it was the only dragon that had ever loved him in return. Their time together had been too short.

  He sniffed, blinking away tears behind his dragon mask as the real dragons turned their severe gazes upon him.

  There is no escape now, said the boss dragon, the golden one. Your death will be final. Are you prepared?

  “Um…no?”

  We will give you a moment, said the dragon. They waited, staring at him.

  That was worse, actually.

  Now… The golden dragon crawled through the air toward Emmius. He reached out a clawed hand.

  A commotion arose from behind the dragons. Emmius saw only a few flashes of light against the color-burned sky, for the golden dragon filled his entire vision.

  The golden dragon turned its head to look, and it was because of that motion that Anthea missed. She appeared in the air, blazing with light alongside her white eagle, and she screamed as she cleaved the air with her scythe. The blade narrowly missed scratching the face of the golden dragon, though it did succeed in severing a single golden whisker. That whisker twined like a strain of music in the wind as it drifted down to Anthea and Emmius.

  Begone, songless, said the dragon as it turned a fierce gaze back upon them. Unless you too wish for death.

  *

  So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear.

  -

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Unless you too wish for death. Anthea almost smiled. She did wish for death. But not yet. And not for Emmius.

  The very thought of what she was doing still filled her with an exhilarated horror. Defying the dragons. Fighting them. But what else was there to do?

  “You will not touch him,” she said. A nearby explosion drowned out part of her words, but she knew the dragons heard anyway.

  She faced them for a moment, bracing herself against a vicious sweep that pulled through her and tried to tug her soul away from her body. The only chance for her and Emmius now was for her angel to take them away. She had to be quick.

  “Angel!” she shouted. She meant to follow it up with a command, but she was not fast enough. Golden Dawn moved like the wind, and a clawed hand swatted the white eagle away from Anthea.

  Anthea reacted on pure adrenalin and instinct. She turned to Emmius and charged. Her half-formed arda glared with white light as she poured all of her energy into a rush of wind to carry her along. She tackled Emmius over the coral, up into the air and out of Golden Dawn’s immediate reach.

  She kept going, over sharp reefs of buckling coral and spumes of blue sand that shot up from the heaving earth, carrying Emmius with the aid of the wind. She couldn’t outrun the dragons, but she only needed to stall until—

  Something crashed against her from the side. She and Emmius tumbled onto a patch of strangely soft sand.

  The dragons were all around them, outlined against the chaotic skies.

  Stop this foolishness, said Golden Dawn.

  “You stop it,” she replied from the sand. She struggled to her feet and glared up at the dragons who had loved her. She clenched her pale weaponless hands into useless fists. “What has Emmius ever done to any of you? The world is ending!”

  But this is not the end, as you well know.

  Part of the color-stained sky above the dragons seemed to open up, to become as bright as the sun. At first Anthea thought it was a large meteor fallen from the rings, bearing down upon them. But then…

  “No,” she whispered. A thrill of terror coursed through her like ice rushing in her veins. She crouched down, tried to make herself unseen. “Please, no…”

  But it was them, the Burning Books blazing in the sky, so bright and terrible that even the sweeps and the falling debris were dim by comparison, and there was not a thing that Anthea could do to stop them from coming, or to tear her eyes away. The gleaming metal pages turned and turned, full of words that should not be read. They dripped with fire; they sparkled with stars; they were as hot as a furnace. A falling meteor crashed and exploded uselessly against one of them, unable even to scratch out half a word. How many books were there? Three? An entire fleet, filling the sky? A limitless multitude, like the stars in the heavens? Or just one? It was impossible to say.

  The dragons turned their heads up to look, to see that which terrified her so. And although Anthea was not looking at the dragons, it seemed to her that they saw the books as well. Some recoiled; others swiftly turned away. Golden Dawn trembled.

  And then, while the dragons were distracted, Anthea’s angel appeared above her, mercifully blocking the view of the books. For that alone, Anthea would have loved that cloud-white eagle forever.

  “Now,” she whispered hoarsely. She stooped to clutch the filthy and ragged body of Emmius, and she drew him close.

  The eagle dove into them. There was a flash of light.

  *

  Derxis laughed and laughed as he watched the world burn. Makes me seem like a supervillain, he thought, and that made him laugh all the more. He laughed until tears rolled down his face. But no one could see the tears. They were behind the mask, for one thing. Everyone was dead, for another.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He stood in front of the big viewing screen and watched a live feed of the sweeps and the meteor storm of supercharged arda that scoured the surface of the planet. He didn’t know where anyone was, or what they were doing. His comm band didn’t seem to be working. And the lens of the camera looked to be cracking. Like broken glass was the sky of Infernus.

  Remnant officials lay sprawled around him. Five, it looked like. Poison.

  He hadn’t really meant to kill all of them. Or had he? He couldn’t really remember. Maybe he had used a bit of mind magic on himself. Could he do that? He didn’t know. Could he have known, but erased the knowledge? What else might he have once known? Could he not even trust himself?

  His laughter was tinged with insanity.

  Maybe you are a supervillain, D-man.

  Maybe you found your calling, Derxis.

  Maybe they deserved it, D-man.

  Oh, we both know they did, Derxis.

  Maybe we saw the viridesces, thought about Fiora.

  Maybe got a little carried away.

  Maybe it doesn’t matter. Look at that. Just look at it.

  Yeah. Look.

  It was beautiful. It was a masterpiece of a painting, one he wished he had done long ago. The colors! The light! The end of the world.

  And here he was, without an angel, about to die. No angel, no escape. Dying now would be dying for real.

  Wait, why are we about to die?

  Oh. Right. The self-destruct sequence. He checked it. About a minute left. Had he done that? Yeah, probably. Putting the poor tortured souls to rest.

  Daimon were banging on the door. They probably had masks like his (his scariest mask yet!), and wouldn’t die to the toxins in the air. They would shoot him for sure, and then they would stop the countdown.

  Anything we can do about that, D-man?

  Well…

  He still had his zurna. His paints, his masks, his zurna. The three things he always checked for. He could play music. His greatest song yet. His death song. He could play death. He’d never done that before. The elder Nuncio had warned him. Never play the music of death.

  Also, he’d have to take the mask off.

  The countdown: forty-five seconds. The door was being sliced open with a laser cutter, very swiftly.

  Derxis took a deep breath, peeled the mask off, and put the zurna to his lips. He tasted the poison on the reed as he licked it. Poison, plasma rifles, or explosion—which would it be? And still no angel. Pity about that. He’d really thought he’d get out. He’d thought they all would.

  No use doubting now! He flipped a coin up into the air and began to play. The door exploded inward as the coin hit the floor. Derxis didn’t bother looking to see how it landed. It didn’t matter. Everything would be okay.

  *

  Fiora led the forvalaca across the room, away from Rasmus and the containment unit. Rasmus’s angel took her in a series of short jumps, but even that was almost not fast enough to stay ahead of the forvalaca. The beast bounded like dark lightning across the bright room.

  The forvalaca was terrifying, and Fiora felt fear, but she also felt pity. She could see it in those cold violet eyes: pain, anger, fear. She could always tell when something was hurting.

  Fiora released the soft white fur of the tiger when they reached the far side of the room. She whispered quick instructions in its ear. A thunderous crash reverberated through the floor and shook the viewports in their frames. Rasmus was breaking the containment device. But Fiora had no time to think about that, because at that moment the forvalaca was there, looming above her. Her mouth was wide, her teeth long and sharp, her breath as cold as an arctic wind.

  The forvalaca lunged at her. Her teeth clacked shut on empty air as Fiora vanished in a flash.

  The tiger appeared in the air over the forvalaca for a fraction of a second and dropped her off on top before materializing once more in front of the beast.

  Fiora fell onto the neck of the forvalaca. She seized hold of the black fur, crusty with frost, and clutched it with all her strength. The beast went wild. She bucked and twisted; she snarled and hissed in rage. She rolled over on her back, crushing Fiora against her neck, crushing her against the metallic collar. Fiora hooked herself onto the collar and held tight with her eyes squeezed shut. The forvalaca could not bite her here, but the beast was flexible. Two of her rear legs swiped at Fiora, scratching like a cat at a flea. Frigid claws scored Fiora’s back. They sealed themselves with instant frostbite, freezing her blood. There would be scars there, on top of the scars from Rasmus. The tail lashed at her, bathing her in frigid fires.

  She heard the growl of a tiger, deep and menacing. She felt the forvalaca react to being bitten. Even with her eyes shut tight, she could see everything. The forvalaca forgot about her; she paid attention to the real threat, to its quarry.

  Fiora opened her eyes, turned her attention to the cold metal to which she was partially frozen. A collar, a broad band of metal as wide as her torso, a complicated mechanical contraption that she could not even begin to understand. She searched it with bleary eyes and hands numb with cold.

  The forvalaca ignored her for the moment, but still thrashed about with such alacrity that her every action threatened to dislodge Fiora. She hooked herself in behind the collar as much as she was able to, but it was tight, and parts of it burrowed down into the neck of the forvalaca.

  And all this time she heard the loud, furious crashing noises from Rasmus. Was it working? Was he breaking it open? She didn’t know; she couldn’t think about it.

  She found what she was looking for just as Rasmus’s angel roared in pain. The forvalaca had the tiger in her jaws. It could not run now. But Fiora saw a pad for reading key cards there beside a row of blue buttons further along the collar.

  She reached into her jacket, which was frozen stiff, and with a shaking hand she pulled out the key card she had taken earlier from the pocket of the yellow officer. She clutched it tight, fearing to drop it. She nearly fainted from dizziness and cold shock as she slapped the card onto the reader. It flashed with light. It turned green. Some of the buttons lit up.

  The forvalaca stiffened and went still as she sensed something happening to her collar.

  Three blue buttons. Three symbols. Fiora could not read them; she could not understand them. The forvalaca was growling. Fiora felt the deep rumble in the beast’s chest. The forvalaca was angry. She was so angry!

  Frightened, Fiora reached way up and pushed one of the buttons.

  Pain coursed through her. Something not quite like electricity ran vicious circles inside of her, like a wave of fire that burst every drop of her blood into flame. It was hot, incredibly hot. Fiora and the beast shrieked together.

  The forvalaca collapsed, writhing. Fiora wanted to let go. All she wanted was to let go, to scream and shake in pain. She wanted it to stop. But she also wanted…something else. What was it? She couldn’t let go. She had to…to push another button. That was it. But her body would not work. Her arm would not move. Somewhere, thunder boomed. Rasmus.

  Be like Rasmus! she thought. Make it happen!

  Slowly, much too slowly, she forced her arm up the collar, toward the buttons. The thrashing of the forvalaca made it impossible. It rolled over on top of her, and she felt something snap inside of her chest. But then, for a small instant, the beast was still.

  Fiora lunged, powered through the pain in a way that she had never known possible, and she struck another one of the buttons.

  The collar hissed. It shuddered. It made a series of horrible snick sounds. It fell from the neck of the forvalaca, and Fiora fell with it, clattering bloody and half-frozen to the floor.

  The forvalaca was up on her feet in an instant. She spun in a fluid motion and snatched Fiora up in her jaws. An act of rage, of panic, of confusion. Fiora forgave her, even when she felt the agony of being impaled on those teeth and realized she had just been bitten in half.

  She had seconds to live. And no angel. Her frog was gone, locked away right over there across the room.

  But she had faith in Rasmus, even as her vision began to turn grey and confusing around the edges, like being put to sleep.

  *

  Rasmus threw his entire strength into every blow. He struck with the power of his arm, his torso, his hips, his legs. The containment unit squealed as it was torn from its moorings on the plated floor, and Rasmus’s feet crunched down into the reinforced surface of that same floor, crumpling it like foil from the recoil of his punches.

  Yet the containment unit was incredibly strong. The outer metallic surface yielded beneath his adamant gauntlets, but something behind that metal met his fists like an immovable forcefield.

  “It is useless,” said a voice, which Rasmus at first took to be the voice of the godshatter speaking to him. But no, it came from a small speaker on the exterior of the containment unit. “This is Reacher technology,” the voice continued. It was smug, confident, even a little amused. “You are striking a trans-dimensional barrier. It cannot be broken through by force.”

  The voice began to say something else, going on about how only such a barrier could hold the angels, but Rasmus crushed the speaker with a blow. He had no time for this. No time. Fiora was dealing with the forvalaca; he could hear it crashing behind him. His other friends were out there without their angels: Derxis, Acarnus, Zayana. And time was running out, as his godshatter reminded him. The scars on his arms burned almost painfully. No time, it shouted.

  No time.

  Rasmus closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. With intense concentration, he supercharged his arda. He summoned all of his willpower. He would break the containment unit. He had to. And he would.

  He crackled and thundered, and his eyes blazed when he opened them, and the godshatter on his arms shone like the sun. He roared like a tiger. His first blow ripped the containment unit from the floor and hurled it against the exterior wall. It cracked the viewing windows.

  His angel appeared beside him, wounded, unaffected by the electricity spreading from Rasmus. The tiger growled urgently at him. Rasmus turned and saw Fiora in the jaws of the beast.

  I will be your storm and your shield.

  And it was the nature of things, he would later reflect, that it was small Fiora, not his own might or ability, which gave him the strength to do the impossible.

  He charged the containment device, his every step a thunder that shook the satellite, and he struck it with an immeasurable force, for it was the force of necessity. Rasmus knew, beyond a doubt, that he would break it. He would crack it open like an egg. He would punch through the boundaries of reality if he had to.

  And he did.

  Both he and the containment device blew through the exterior wall of the station as though it was not there at all. They flew into the void of space amid a shower of shattered windows. Rasmus’s fist was inside the containment device. He joined his hands in the hole he had created, and with a silent roar, he tore the capsule asunder.

  The explosive backlash killed him. When the containment device ruptured, its shockwave struck Rasmus as he had struck it—with an incredible crushing force. It flung him back to the station and into the emergency shielding walls that had slammed down over the shattered windows. His impact cratered the thick metal and snapped his neck.

  Yet he saw it before he died: a deeper darkness obscuring the vista of space. Two eyes and a mouthful of glaring teeth, all glittering like evil stars. It was the Grim King, too late to seize the angels. Rasmus had won the race.

  Rasmus’s godshatter called out to the Grim King a warning, to which the Grim King answered contempt. It was a reunion: the Thunder God and the outcast.

  Rasmus understood as he died, and as his angel took him away to another world, that he had come face to face with the Changing God.

  *

  Turned out to be the plasma rifles. He had stalled them for a few seconds with his music, but they had precautionary measures(earplugs?) in place. He took several plasma bolts to the torso, one of which incidentally obliterated his zurna.

  But he wasn’t done yet. He just had to stall them for a little bit longer. So he reached into his deep pockets, grabbed a double handful of powdered pigments, and flung them up into the air. He burned orange—bright, so bright, and all the colors were his colors.

  The poison was a cloudy mist in the air; the flashing lights and the plasma rifles that continued to fire as he collapsed behind a console made everything flash like a crazy lightshow, all set against the backdrop of the greatest lightshow of all: the surface of Infernus. As his vision blurred and his blood left him, Derxis laughed about that. They had gone and killed the music before the party even started.

  He moved the colors. He moved their minds. Awe. Wonder. Laughter. If everything was ending—and it certainly was ending, just look at it—then why not enjoy the view?

  He put everything he had into it. His assailants stalled, entranced by the light and colors, sharing a mystery and a wonder with a dying color priest. Someone snapped out of it after a few more seconds, but not quickly enough.

  The countdown reached zero. Somewhere, something important blew up. Then something else, closer.

  Then, an ominous pause.

  A little chameleon, pure white and eyeless (which was a real bummer; Derxis liked the eyes) appeared in front of him. Derxis tried to giggle, but his throat was full of warm orange blood.

  The whiteness of the chameleon filled his vision, and he was gone from that place only a second before a more destructive light reduced his body to ash and dust.

  *

  Fiora heard the great crash as though from under twenty feet of water. The forvalaca put her down, gently releasing her from her jaws.

  Fiora’s head rested on its side on the hard white floor. She wanted to move it, to look around, but she had no strength. She could barely see.

  A small white frog hopped into her vision. It looked at her without eyes.

  Fiora smiled. Everything went white.

  *

  Back when the world still worked, the Local Docking Network had been a hub of activity. All traffic to and from Infernus routed through the LDN. Its six-fold symmetry had been modeled after a snowflake, and now it glittered in the light of the sweeps like a big brittle snowflake in the night, caught by a rainbow moonbeam. Its central prime hub stretched out to touch the six axial sector hubs, and from there intricate angular capillaries branched out into fractal filaments. Once, gleaming starships had swarmed around the LDN. It had belonged to the Shogunate before the Remnant took it over, and Akkama had once snuck aboard a freighter just so she could fly up and see it. Her clan leader had been furious, but it had been worth it. She had always dreamed of getting her own ship and launching from the LDN, out to the far outposts in the outer wilds as Captain Shard had.

  Now the LDN was still and silent. No one there but the Remnant, and even they, strangely, did not attempt to shoot her down as her autopilot took her smoothly in to a small bay for private vessels.

  She had come alone, and that thought pleased her. She did not need Acarnus here. She had never needed him, really. He was just useful.

  She didn’t see many Remnant as she explored the once-bustling halls. Those she did find were frightened of her, and it was disappointingly easy to cut them down. One of them stutteringly answered her questions first, and that was how she learned that Rasmus was here.

  She found his trail easily enough. He had opted to forge his own route directly toward the angel containment unit. Like a moron. What if he had busted through a wall into the void of space?

  Some impact kept shaking the entire B sector as she followed the wreckage. The vibrations mingled with thunder. What was he trying to do, bring down the whole station?

  She came upon an assault squad as she neared the source of the ruckus. They hung back nervously, huddled behind a corner. The thunderous noise ahead captured all of their attention; she came up beside them without them even noticing.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked the one closest to her.

  “Intruder,” he said without looking.

  “What, just one? So what’s the big deal?”

  “It’s the keeper of the Thunder Temple,” one of them whispered, awestruck.

  “Don’t matter,” said another of the squad, who talked around something she was chewing. “He’s tryin’ to break the containment unit. Won’t break. It’s the damn beast we’re worried about.”

  “He didn’t kill it, did he?” Akkama asked. The thought of Rasmus beating her to it made her angry. Her arda glowed hot, causing the nearest soldier to shift away from her.

  “Wouldn’t mind so much if he…” The one she’d been standing by finally shot an annoyed glance in her direction. He trailed off as the realization slowly came over him that she was not an Ephathite.

  She and her angel killed them quickly; only one of them gave her any trouble. No need to waste her time on small fry. The entire station shook violently as soon as the last one hit the floor. It was the greatest explosion yet—much too big to be the doing of Rasmus himself. Was the LDN being attacked?

  Akkama hissed in annoyance and rushed toward the noise. She cleared the final hole that Rasmus had punched through a wall with an acrobatic leap, and she landed ready to fight.

  It was the B-sector hub, and Rasmus was nowhere to be seen. Blast covers shielded the far side of the room; something had blown a hole into, or out of, the side of the LDN. But she didn’t waste time wondering about that, because the forvalaca was here too, alive and well. It was crouched over the mauled corpse of Fiora, whose arda was already turning black.

  Something huge and dark briefly passed between the LDN and the surface of Infernus, cutting off the light and shadowing the entire room. Such a shadow also crossed Akkama’s heart as she gazed at Fiora’s body. She felt strangely cold. Cold and hot, all at once.

  The forvalaca lay low on the floor and nudged Fiora gently. It licked at her. Huge beads of ice clustered around the beast’s eyes. Frozen tears.

  Akkama stepped further into the room. She intentionally crunched shattered glass under her heel. The forvalaca’s head snapped up; its star-toothed eyes narrowed. It hissed at Akkama as it rose protectively over Fiora’s body. The tail lashed, throwing fire.

  The hero comes.

  Akkama drew Nemesis. The edge was already red hot, burning like her arda. She said, with a shaky voice, “You hurt my friend, bitch.”

  *

  The forvalaca was the great beast which had sprung from the Burning God. She recognized her creator, but that was no cause for her to restrain herself. Now that she was free, she fought as she had never fought before.

  When the dangerous black serpent tried to take away the body of the forvalaca’s savior, she pounced with a cold fury, and she took the coiling black snake in her jaws, and she crushed it apart. She tore it to shivering, furious pieces. Its otherness made the tearing difficult, and it kept trying to move itself to another place, and it tasted like smoke and dreams and empty valor. The forvalaca pitied it as she revoked its life.

  And then the other serpent, the red one, more dangerous still, sought vengeance for its fallen ally.

  They collided: two flavors of fire; two grief-stricken dangerous beasts. The Local Docking Network, battered by the explosion that killed Rasmus and wrenched in passing by the Grim King in his cold fury, began to slide out of orbit.

  *

  Zayana watched it all happen from the comfort and stillness of a safe place. Of course, she could not see. But she heard, and she felt, and she sensed the arda and the inner music of her friends through the books around her.

  She was in a library. She had always liked libraries, and even now, when they seemed like a cruel joke, she could not help but be attracted to them. The scent of leather and glue, the smell of old books, the weight of accumulated wisdom. The peace and quiet.

  The shelves here ran on forever, as far as she knew. She had spent an hour walking and walking, trailing her hand along an endless row of mysterious books. Sometimes there was a break in the shelves, sometimes a clear space with comfortable chairs and desks and tables. Sometimes she found a ladder. She had tried climbing a ladder once and given up after several hundred steps. One advantage of blindness: no dizzying vertigo at the sight of great heights.

  Sometimes she found a harp. She typically obliged the mysterious custodian who left it for her by playing a tune. Usually she had to spend a half hour tuning it first.

  Yet for all the irony—blind girl in a library—this was her favorite place in the Museum. Maybe because it was cozy. Everywhere else was made of huge, open, echoey spaces that frightened her because she had no idea what was out there. And it was always changing, just as the mysterious Kaitlyn Carter had said months ago. Almost alive . But the library, with its soft carpet and friendly books and comfy chairs, was a place she enjoyed.

  Every book in this library told a story. She had a dozen or so open on the table in front of her. In one of them, Rasmus had just died. In another, Fiora. Reading Fiora’s death hurt Zayana, though she knew Fiora had escaped true death. Her story continued on the next page. And in Akkama’s book, the red daimon engaged in heroic combat with the forvalaca as the space station began a descent toward the blazing atmosphere of Infernus.

  Zayana ran her hand lightly over the page. The scene came to her—the shouting and the heat of the fires, the fury, the red of Akkama and blue-purple of the beast. And even now that her angel had been slain, Akkama still fought. Even now that dying would be a true death, she could not back down.

  “Oh, Akkama,” Zayana whispered.

  Zayana knew she should be waking up soon. Jeronimy had activated the machine early, for whatever reason, and she had been asleep. She would wake up soon, and thanks to Rasmus, her angel would be with her. She should then find a door and go through back into this place so that she could help the others. Fiora and Rasmus, Derxis, Anthea and Emmius and Rosma, all of them already here somewhere in the Museum.

  But on the other hand, maybe she could help Akkama.

  The library shook before she could make a decision. It faded from around her, replaced by cold air and a sensation of speed as she awoke. She saw the skies ablaze in her mind, for once very close to what she would have seen with her biological eyes. The sweeps thrashed the surrounding landscape; they tore at her almost painfully. Pieces of arda from the rings of Infernus burned through the sea of colors above as though all the stars were falling.

  And someone was holding her. Someone green.

  “Kartha!” she exclaimed. “What—”

  A detonation ripped through the air, cutting off her words. The thing moving beneath them sprang gracefully, carried them up. Zsythristria. They were riding the unicorn. Why?

  “Had to leave,” said Kartha. He sounded distracted. “No more castle, Zayana.”

  No more castle? That didn’t matter. No more kingdom. No more world.

  Zsythristria carried them Zayana knew not where. Somewhere safe, perhaps, if such a place existed. Zsythristria dodged and weaved in great arcs to circumnavigate the blast radii of the falling arda. Zayana clung tightly to her impossibly soft mane.

  Her angel appeared during that wild ride beneath a dying sky. A tiny spider, a little light in her mind.

  “Zayana!” Kartha exclaimed when the angel appeared. “It’s back! What now? Only say the word.”

  What now? Now, she abruptly realized, she had a choice. She could take the time to find a door and get out safely, without dying. Or…

  “Kartha,” she said. “Zsythristria. Thank you. For everything. But I need to go.” She awkwardly hugged Kartha behind her. She leaned down and kissed Zsythristria on the neck, enjoying the scent of the unicorn one last time.

  And then she whispered to her tiny white spider. The spider flashed with light, and Zayana’s body went limp, consigned to abandonment on a dying world.

  *

  Acarnus didn’t take the entire Iterator; he took everything in a thirty foot radius around the echo engine. He had never made an echo jump before, and he broke regulations on his first effort by jumping to a location inside the atmosphere of a planet.

  He had been located on the surface of Infernus opposite the sun, near astronomical midnight. His destination was almost a quarter of the way around the world in reverse direction of the planet’s rotation, near the sunset. This was lucky; it meant that relative momentum would not hurl him out of the atmosphere, nor fling him across the landscape at thousands of kilometers per hour. But it did crush his little bubble of metal against the desert sands while the 90-degree alteration in gravity dragged him sideways. To Acarnus, it seemed as though he had not moved at all; the world outside, unseen through the metal walls around him, simply swatted him with the force of a rocket in flight. The walls around him and the echo drive crumpled like paper and were stripped away to reveal a hot red world beyond.

  The impact would have left him as a grey smear on the sands had he not foreseen it and equipped himself with a survival suit. The suit reflexively forced Acarnus into a hard little ball, and it protected him as inertia smashed him into the unforgiving sand and then towed him through it.

  The disorientation was immense. Everything he had subconsciously known about his surroundings changed in an instant. But after a moment to clear his head, once he had come to a violent halt against a rock, he slowly regained control of his limbs from the survival suit and tried to stand. He couldn’t manage standing at first, so he settled for getting to his knees. Only the strength of the suit enabled him to rise up from under the great weight of sand on top of him. He burrowed out and up to the surface.

  The desert sands here were reddish-orange even in daylight, but by the spectacular fiery colors of sunset, they glared with ruddy haze. Small crushed pieces of Iterator had scarred the desert, most of them terminating long gashes in the flat red sand. It looked as though something had crashed into the surface at an extreme angle and at high speeds. Which was exactly the case, in fact. Nothing had survived, not even the echo engine itself. Even his survival suit, which was designed to protect daimon against high-velocity debris in space, had taken a beating.

  This sort of thing was why endoatmospheric jumps were against regulations.

  Acarnus surveyed his surroundings, identified no immediate threats, and took a minute to climb out of the suit. Flat red sands, rich in iron. A wasteland, speckled with boulders and odd formations of sandstone and lime. He saw a number of voidbound in the distance, dark figures lurching aimlessly. If they saw him, they would be aimless no more.

  He had landed precisely where he had intended: in the middle of the eastern deserts. He had no idea where, exactly, his target could be found. However, this likely did not matter. They said that seeking the Desert Watcher is enough. They said that the Desert Watcher knows when it is sought, and if it wills it, it will find the seeker.

  “You do not have much time, Watcher,” said Acarnus to the fading sunset and the darkening rock-scattered sands. The sweeps rose like the ominous edge of a luminous tsunami far across the skies. They splashed against the night-side of Infernus and washed around the world. That would be troublesome. At least here he would be relatively safe from the debris of the falling ring system.

  A warm wind blew, stirred the sand around him. The sand moved oddly; it ran into rivulets that curled in on themselves like tentacles.

  “It is not I,” said a voice, “who is short on time.” The voice was made up of a dozen voices all whispering, overlapping, and each was a voice that Acarnus knew. One of them was his own.

  Acarnus turned around and faced the being which had silently appeared behind him. It was made of sand in constant motion, sand that swirled and shifted in the air. The sand formed a roughly canine figure twice as tall as Acarnus, and slanted silver eyes peered down at him from an arenaceous suggestion of a face. “That is what I meant,” said Acarnus. “I do not have much time.”

  The Desert Watcher turned its gradually consolidating wolflike head to one side. The head kept turning, and eventually came all the way around to where it began. But all the time that the sand turned, the eyes remained still, fixed on Acarnus. A chill ran through Acarnus at the unnatural sight.

  “Yes,” the Desert Watcher continued after an uncomfortable silence. “And so. Speak.”

  “There is something I desire,” said Acarnus. He meant to continue, but stopped when he saw the Watcher’s reaction. It shivered all over. The wolflike form, which had almost been clearly described from the churning sands, dissolved into an excited cloud that collapsed partway back to the desert floor. Yet the eyes remained, still and ominous.

  “What?” asked the Watcher, and Acarnus detected the excitement in the many overlapping voices with which it spoke. “What do you desire?”

  Acarnus took a deep breath. “My memories,” he said. “All of them. I want them back.”

  The sand rushed in speeding arcs that flared out from the vaguely canine form like a sun’s corona. The red grains reflected the last glimmering light of the sunset and the approaching sweeps. “I can give this to you. Here they are. Look.” A sandy pseudopod extended from the breast of the wolf. It reached out to Acarnus and opened to reveal a glossy grey orb.

  “Take it,” said the Desert Watcher. Acarnus heard all the voices, including his own, overlapping, pleading. Take it, said Rasmus. Take it, said Jeronimy. Take it, said Zayana and Fiora and Derxis and the rest. Take it, said Brother Chain. And himself. And Anthea.

  He knew the stories. And what was more, he knew Akkama. He knew that what the Watcher offered was always a curse, though it gave exactly what was asked. But he had already decided.

  He reached out and grasped the grey orb. It was cool and smooth to the touch, and it melted into his hand the moment he touched it. He felt no different.

  The Desert Watcher did not speak again. It did not laugh in triumph or stay to watch. It simply closed its eyes. All the red sand poured limp and lifeless from the air into a heap in front of Acarnus.

  Acarnus frowned. That was it? Could he remember now? He tried to remember. He thought back…

  And yes. Something was there that had not been there before. Emotions he could not recall. Places he had never been. All blurry, all vague. Some memories felt old, very old. And there were too many; there was too much. He caught a glimpse of a battle amid the stars in a place he was sure he had never been. He saw a strange city filled with strange creatures, and he remembered his awe. He saw a decagon and ten doors.

  But it was all a jumbled mess. He could not make sense of any of it. And where was Anthea? He saw her laughing, the wind in her hair, looking…what? Beautiful? Yes, and he had felt something, something very unusual. Something he could not explain.

  He growled in frustration. What in the hells had the Watcher given him? Maybe it simply took time. Maybe his subconscious had to sort it all out. He knew nothing of the mechanisms involved in such transfusions of memories. Questions for Derxis.

  A noise awakened him from his reverie. The voidbound had come for him. An entire horde.

  It was, he soon discovered, the horde that had slain and absorbed the Shrike. He did not stand a chance. But his angel came for him before they tore him to pieces, and it took him and his confused memories to another world.

  *

  It was a battle for the ages, one worthy of Captain Shard herself. Akkama had never felt so alive, had never felt such a thrill, had never faced such a worthy opponent. Heat and cold flared throughout the wrecked hub. The forvalaca was as quick as Akkama, and much stronger. She was old and clever, and she had many weapons: her teeth, her flaming tail, the claws of all six legs. But Akkama had the superior weapon and the recklessness of fury. It was she who attacked. Nemesis carved the air in rapid arcs; an unending advance of bright crescents seared through space as though the dragonsteel blade split the fabric of reality with each stroke.

  They both bled, panted, wary and worn by the time that the artificial gravity systems failed. But they did not stop. They battled in unfamiliar conditions of zero-gravity, which slowly succumbed to the very faint gravity of the planet below.

  And when a stray fragment of Infernus’ rings slipped past the malfunctioning defense systems and collided with the Local Docking Network, it broke the snowflake like shattering ice. The central hub of the B sector depressurized as unstoppable forces cracked it like an egg. Akkama and the forvalaca, locked in combat, were sucked out into the cold airless silence of space above the raging sea of colors.

  And it was there, as Akkama grappled with the beast in the near-weightless nothing of the burning superatmosphere, that the battle reached a conclusion. For in the void of space, neither blue nor red fire could take form. It was claws and teeth and sword alone. Claws and teeth extracted their share of pain, but the blade prevailed, as did the heart behind it. For the forvalaca feared death, and she knew that there was no salvation for her now. She would burn in the atmosphere even if she slew her opponent. But Akkama had no fear, and she laughed in silent triumph as her blade severed half the neck of Fiora’s murderer, and even that frigid blood could not freeze her burning blade.

  Drenched in the icy violet blood, Akkama shoved the dying beast away from her. She had won. She had slain one of the great beasts. And now she would die, but at least she would die satisfied.

  She wondered, as her lungs burned and she turned her face to the sea of lights to which she and the mass of mangled LDN debris around her accelerated: would she die from burning up on re-entry, or from hypoxia? Or from the debris of the falling LDN that crashed around her? Some small pieces spun by at such velocity that they would hardly notice if they passed through her body.

  She felt no fear. After all, every single daimon had freefallen to the surface like this at least once in their lives. She’d made this trip before!

  But neither was she done fighting. Not yet, not ever. She struggled, freezing and asphyxiating and trailing a stream of fiery blood like a dying comet. There was nothing to fight, but she held fast to the hilt of Nemesis, and with her other hand she checked the slender pocket at her hip to make sure the journal was still there. A pity it would burn up in the atmosphere. If there was one part of her that she wished would survive…

  Akkama slipped her hand into that pocket, removed the journal. Her oxygen-deprived brain searched desperately for a way to save it. Maybe…maybe if she threw it…

  Something white flashed nearby. Akkama braced herself for impact, but the blow never came. Instead, something grabbed hold of her arm from behind. Akkama had barely the strength to turn, and her vision was fading; she could not see who was grabbing her. An arm reached around, held something green against Akkama’s chest. The green flashed with light; a shocking burst of healing made her gasp out her remaining air.

  Fiora? But Fiora had died. Akkama passed out wondering if she were already dreaming.

  *

  Zayana ignored the heat—both of Akkama and the rapidly building friction against the upper atmosphere. She held onto Akkama long enough for her angel to zip around them a few times, tethering them together with its nearly unbreakable shining thread. Zayana saw that thread in her mind, and she saw when the spider bound several objects that floated in the nearby space. Zayana reached out to pluck the journal from the air where it had slipped from Akkama’s grasp. And, after a long moment of internal debate, she did the same to the dragonsteel sword.

  She nodded at her angel. It took her and Akkama a short distance away in a disorienting flash of light. And then again. And again. Faster, faster. The silently shuttering scenery might have bewildered her had she been able to see it. The spider was looking for a door.

  Zayana’s lungs were aching when at last her angel teleported her to a broad tubular segment that had once been a corridor on the station. The angel dropped them right in front of a plain metal door with a simple latch handle. Then it disappeared in a blink of white light.

  A dim roar began to surround them as they transitioned into the atmosphere. Everything trembled, a vibration that swiftly expanded to a violent shaking.

  Zayana seized the latch and pulled. The door did not budge. She threw her weight against it as best she could while falling and tumbling and tied to an unconscious body.

  The door opened inward. She and Akkama fell through in an awkward heap. Zayana rolled them away from the door and kicked it shut.

  “Easy,” she whispered to herself as she lay panting and gasping for breath on the soft carpet of an unknown place that was not falling, not burning. When Akkama awoke and asked what had happened, Zayana decided that she would embellish it. Just a little.

  *

  The light of the sweeps parted around the Grim King when he descended through the sky. He carried darkness with him. He carried the Voidlight. He left a trail of blackness like a spreading stain in his wake, as though the void of space was a tarry fluid that he pulled down behind him like hot taffy. That stygian mass reached down from the heavens to touch Jeronimy’s mountain, and when it arrived, the Grim King looked with his terrible eyes shining in the dark, and he saw the SADs and the Iterator and the uppermost lens of the Kaleidoscope that had broken his dream.

  The Grim King was shapeless, changing. Limbs of darkness reached down and pried apart the SADs, crushing and twisting, wrenching them and discarding the debris along the scorched slopes of the mountain. A black spear skewered the Kaleidoscope from top to bottom, then rent it asunder.

  He flowed into the great space where the Kaleidoscope had stood. He could smell the one he hated. And he could smell a key.

  *

  Jeronimy could not find Emmius. Where the fuck had he gone? He couldn’t possibly have died to the Ephathites, not with a gods-damned dragon as an angel. But he was nowhere in the Iterator. Had he left already?

  Jeronimy accessed video feed of the Kaleidoscope room, and that was how he found out that the Ephathites had ceased to be a concern. At first he saw only blackness in the video feed, and he thought his cameras were malfunctioning. But eyes appeared in the blackness. Two eyes, and a shining array of sharp teeth, all dripping with the Voidlight. They turned to the camera, and Jeronimy cut the connection.

  He stared blankly ahead of him. Those had been his eyes.

  He sensed his shadow urging him, flickering frantically. He should go. Yeah. He should walk through a door, any fucking door (this Iterator was full of doors), and into the dream world. He should do that.

  But he couldn’t move. He could not have moved if his life depended upon it, which it did. Something anchored him here. The Grim King. The Voidlight. Maybe the tantalizing hint of something really fucking important that he could learn.

  The Grim King wasted no time. It tore through the corpse of the Iterator as though all the metal and plastic and wiring were cobwebs in its path. It eviscerated Nonpareil Nescience and left in its wake a vast dark cavern that groaned ominously under the weight of the mountain.

  And then the fateful meeting. The Grim King took the lid off the room containing Jeronimy like a child opening a jar to observe some fascinating insect. They gazed at each other: a small black daimon and a mountain of darkness that shivered and seethed like a lake of crude petroleum given life.

  The Grim King condensed its form, drained down into itself until it was a small mass not much larger than Jeronimy. The mass assumed the form of a daimon, and it entered Jeronimy’s room through a door, though it could have swept aside the intervening wall just as easily.

  The Grim King, tall and powerful, wrapped in a cloak of darkness, met the eyes of Jeronimy, and they were the same eyes. Jeronimy’s shadow trembled.

  “What…” Jeronimy began to speak, but his voice was a pathetic squeak. He tried to swallow, but his throat was full of sand. “What do you want?”

  “I want to kill you,” said the Grim King. His voice was the voice of Jeronimy, aged a few decades and with infinitely more malice. The voice of hatred. “I want to take your angel. I want to return to the true home of the daimon and to undo all that has been done.” The Grim King illustrated this with a swift and brutal slicing motion.

  “I…what?” Jeronimy’s eyes were fixed on the hand of the Grim King, briefly visible, which looked exactly like his own hand. A shiny ring, blacker than night, glinted on that hand.

  “I did not expect you to understand,” the beast replied, “but I wanted you to know before I kill you.”

  Jeronimy struggled to find a question, to keep the Grim King talking. “T-true home?”

  “Icarus was the name,” said the Grim King. “Infernus is a borrowed home. I know why you fall from the sky. I know all about the ten of you. The ten of us.” He grinned—a horrible sight, for the face was Jeronimy’s. “We really fucked up, Jeronimy.”

  Jeronimy knew, with a sudden and certain flash of inspiration, that this was the part where the Grim King kills him. Without warning, without further dialogue or drama. Simple and quick. Because that was how he would have done it.

  Jeronimy was resigned to this fate. What point in fighting it? But he felt something cool and hard in one hand, and he realized he had closed his fist around the little piece of Anthea’s arda. White, the color of hope.

  And he wondered if he really wanted to just give up. Even if he survived the next minute, the end result of hopelessness was staring him right in the face. Better to just die, then. Better still to say fuck you. And live.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and he threw the shining white arda into the face of the Grim King.

  Of course, it did not hurt the beast. But it surprised the Grim King long enough for Jeronimy’s shadow to take him away into another world. And who could say whether it was the sudden appearance of bright white arda, or the unexpected defiance from Jeronimy that surprised the Grim King more?

  A voice chased him through the light, followed him through to the other place, a voice almost his own: “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here. Waiting.”

  *

  “So let me get this straight,” said Akkama. “You left yourself to die, your other self, so that you could come here…”

  Zayana nodded.

  “And then you went back out with your angel…”

  Zayana nodded.

  “Risking your life…”

  Zayana shrugged.

  “To grab my sorry ass and pull me back into this…whatever the hell it is. That about right?”

  “That sums it up, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why risk your life for me, after…what I did?”

  “Because I’m you—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit about being my friend.”

  That hurt, but Zayana did not let it show.

  “You hate me,” said Akkama. “You have to.”

  “I will hate whom I choose, Akkama.”

  “But your eyes! And your face!”

  Zayana winced. She didn’t like to think about what her face must look like, even though she did not have to see it. Ever again. “You took the stars from me,” she said. “You took the sky from Anthea. But I don’t hate you, Akkama.”

  Akkama reacted to the unfathomable with her default emotion. “Why the hells not?”

  Zayana felt a sudden warmth against her skin. In her mind, a constellation of glowing coals forming a rough outline of Akkama flared to life. She asked, “Do you want me to hate you, Akkama?”

  “Yes! Well, no. But—but…ARGH!” She smashed something with Nemesis. The heat intensified. Akkama had not let go of the sword since awakening. Zayana was beginning to wonder if it was a bad influence on her. Then again, a bad influence on Akkama was like a drop of poison in a pool of lava. No, that was a horrible thought.

  Zayana sat back against a cool stone column and allowed Akkama to vent her frustration. So much frustration. Zayana guessed that if she were like Derxis and could look into Akkama’s mind, that was what she would see. Endless angry frustration, disguising itself as pride and vanity.

  She should have tried harder, way back then, to prevent Akkama from seeking the Desert Watcher.

  “Where are we, anyway?” asked Akkama after she had calmed down.

  Zayana made a show of looking around, as though she could see. “I have no idea,” she said. “But I know where we need to go.”

  *

  Anthea had her wings back. And not stumpy little half-formed wings of brittle crystal as she had had before. Full, beautiful wings of flexible feathery arda. She could move them, and they tinkled faintly when they flapped. She wondered about this. Why did this version of herself have different wings? It certainly had not come with a Song.

  She knew at once, upon awakening, that her Song had not returned to her. A mysterious dark figure, who didn’t really look like a daimon at all, had left a bamboo flute for her. Hope had blossomed within her. But when she put it to her lips, nothing happened. She had nothing to give it. No voice, no sky, no beauty.

  But she didn’t want to break someone else’s flute, so she left it there on the train station bench and set out down the barren tracks with only her angel for company. She knew what she was looking for.

  Hours later, by her best reckoning of time, she found it: a room with ten walls, ten doors. A decagonal floor, split ten ways, with a symbol in front of each door.

  She found her door easily enough. It was a delicate ivory latticework, exquisitely carved with minute sinuous lines. Like wind. She recognized that she would once have been affected by its remarkable beauty. The symbol in front of the door: a stylized feather.

  She stared at that symbol for a while, committing every detail to memory. She could not decide whether she liked it, or whether it was some kind of horrific insult to her from whom the sky had been taken.

  She stepped through the door without further hesitation.

  The Hero of Wind emerged onto the Tower Moon.

  She was the first.

  *

  Frostfound broke apart suddenly and thoroughly. A Voice within, in its last moments, laughed.

  The magic of Frostfound lost its hold on the ice floes burying the Chelonate Sea. The great turtle, Ma’turin himself, rose up from the depths. That mind sensed the death of its ancient enemy. It sensed its freedom, and the imminent fulfillment of its duty.

  The great turtle twisted fate with a passing thought, and a mighty boulder of supercharged arda struck the ice on the surface where the turtle intended to rise. The explosion reduced the glacial floes to slush and cleared such an area that the turtle could surface with ease.

  And surface it did. It breached into frosty night air bright with the sweeps and the lightstorm of the falling rings. The splash rocked the shattered ice. Ma’turin exhaled in a hurricane torrent, then took a breath as though he intended to inhale the sky itself.

  And the bells of Ys began to ring. It wasn’t sunset; somehow that part of the prophecy had gone astray. But it was certainly the end of the world, and Ma’turin had certainly risen.

  The bell ringers all joined together in song, from the greatest of them to the least. If the music was any less for the lack of Rosma, none knew it. They played music that had been rehearsed for millennia, music that seemed to stir the stars themselves. A dirge, heartbreaking and breathtaking, for the world of Infernus and for the daimon who lived there.

  The music of the bells of Ys carried from one end of the world to the other. The dragons heard it in the Twilight Peaks. The Iterators paused their computing to listen. The Grim King heard, and he both relished and hated it.

  Far away, resting by a cool mountain stream, the unicorn Zsythristria heard it. She raised her head to listen, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. Nearby, Kartha stopped tending to the unconscious body of Zayana. He stood and joined the unicorn, and they looked out at the color-swept skies, which began to brighten with the dawn.