Gwil tried to put Challe down but instead collapsed himself. “I just need a minute,” he grunted, making no effort to get up.

  Leira, the only one of them standing, clicked her tongue. “What is with you guys all lying around? This is no time to be hurt or sad.”

  “Hey,” Gwil said, lifting his head. Burning Nirva crawled through his insides, like water seeping into the soil. He could feel things tightening up inside himself. “Where’s that Legs guy?”

  “The warriors took him away,” Cort said. “Is that a problem?”

  “Nah,” Gwil said. “He’s Hallowed, though. Kind of. Right, so, I know everything. The Jaguar guys are all just clones of the real Tezca—that’s his Invoke, I think. And the biggest Jaguar is actually Tezca, the real Elder Warden, not the claws one. That’s just Claws.”

  Quez started laughing. “Goddess. We are such idiots. Born of idiots, raised by idiots, and glad to be idiots. And now, we finally learn the truth and more than half of us want to bury our heads in the sand. All because of one man and his lies.”

  “It’s more like three men,” Gwil said. “Or six? I dunno.” He poked Challe in the shoulder. “Hey, aren’t you interested? You wanted to know what was going on. Hey, what’s wrong?” He looked up at the others. “Maybe she needs some ketchup.”

  Groaning, Cort took a tube out of his pocket and passed it to Gwil. He unscrewed the cap and tried to feed the ztuff to Challe. She swatted the tube out of his hand.

  Three collective gasps sliced through the air.

  “Challe, c’mon!” Gwil said. “You’re acting crazy. What’s the matter?”

  She sprang up off the floor and shrieked, “Are you blind? Look at all the corpses! My brothers and sisters. Look what I’ve done!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Gwil said. “It’s all Tezca’s fault.”

  Cort sat up so that he could look at Challe, though she’d fallen face down on the floor again. “We started all this. Especially me and Leira. We brought the soldiers here. But… eh. Change never comes easy.”

  “Cort!” Gwil said. “What happened to your teeth?”

  Challe jumped up again to swing at Cort. He let her smack him with three fists. Gasping, she said, “I didn’t want change! I didn’t want anything! I just want my people to live, and I ruined everything.”

  Quez planted himself in the middle of the bunch and grabbed Challe’s wrists. “Challe’Jade. Sister. You are saving us.”

  A single sob racked Challe. “Sworn Guardian. I betrayed my vow. I betrayed you worst of all. It is your duty to execute me.”

  “Sister, you didn’t see what I saw,” Quez said. “I am with you. Beneath the Stormwomb, I saw the evidence of your truth. Tezca has some kind of relationship with those red-eyed soldiers. They’re connected—it must have been going on since the founding of Malikau. Everything was a lie. I found a secret place where all our food and supplies came from. The ones we thought to be miracles of the Goddess. Hidden there was a magical device—it birthed all the soldiers. It wasn’t because of Cort and Leira.”

  The two of them grimaced at each other.

  “You haven’t ruined anything,” Quez continued. “We will come back from this. Malikau can survive anything. That is who we are. Even if that foundation was a lie, if we grew from poisoned ground… There must be something of worth that we can claim for ourselves.”

  Challe clamped two hands over her ears and buried her face in the other two. “I delivered truth, and it was rotten.”

  Gwil flared Nirva and stood up. He’d healed plenty, and the knot in his stomach at seeing Challe like this was worse than anything else. “Those warriors need help,” he said through clenched teeth.

  He turned away and jumped through the archway, landing on the other side of the hole. As he ran toward the fight, he screamed, “Tezca!”

  ***

  “No, sister,” Quez said. “There was nothing wrong with your decision. Tezca stole our ability to decide. Your words were not the problem. His words—five hundred years of lies. His actions—building this temple and trapping us like animals. And damn the ancestors, too, for letting themselves get fooled.”

  “Right on, Quez,” Cort said after an overlong silence from Challe. “Don’t be so harsh on yourselves. Challe, in this World, you can’t afford to carry everyone’s guilt. There’s way too much of that to go around. You’ll drown. You just gotta do what feels right and keep pushing on. Sometimes it works out, a lot of times it doesn’t.”

  “Quez is wrong about something, though,” Leira said quietly. “If we’re gonna be traveling together, I don’t wanna get off on the wrong foot. Those soldiers showing up here was our fault. My fault. A lot of your people died because of me. Hell, we killed all those people with the chairs, too. Anyway, I’m sorry. I didn’t consider how bad things could get.” She smiled. “You’ll probably learn that I’m not as smart as I seem.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “T-traveling together?” Challe said, confusion snapping her out of despair.

  “It’ll be fun, I promise,” Leira said. “You’ll see things you never imagined. You and Gwil can be clueless together.”

  Challe shook her head. “I can’t accept your apology. No matter what you did, you three saved… so many more. The soldiers would’ve slaughtered every last one of us without you.”

  Leira laughed. “Are you even listening to yourself? Don’t you see how generous you’re being with us? Why don’t you treat yourself that way?”

  Challe stared down at the jadestone embedded in the back of one of her hands. The flickering torchlight made its pattern dance.

  “Sorry to you too, Quez,” Cort said. “About the chair thing. That was messy.”

  He shook his head. “There is no need. You’ve welcomed us to the real World. We have hidden here for generations, and that made us weak. Vulnerable. Look at me, my weakness has been screaming in my face from the moment you arrived here.”

  Quez took Challe’s hands and drew her upright. “I am so devastated that if I allow myself to think, I can’t breathe. But I’ve realized a dream that carries me, keeps me going. Please, sister, help me make it real. I want our people to become a part of this World and take back all that was stolen from us. We must confront everything that we’ve hidden from. If there was no Apocalypse, then—”

  I held my breath for this poor, sweet soul who ignorantly burns his life for hope.

  “Er- sorry to cut in,” Leira said. “But there was an Apocalypse. That part’s true, but it was nine hundred years ago. I’m sure your Warden used it as inspiration for his fake lore. There actually were a ton of… demons, to use a term you’ll understand. And they’re still hanging around. And a ton of people did die, but nowhere near everyone.” She laughed. “Why would the divine forces want to exterminate an intelligent species when they can dominate us instead?”

  ***

  “Aw, fuck,” Gwil said as he approached the battling warriors.

  The people of Malikau—the bulk of whom had been gathered on the balconies—had realized this was the center of the action, the place where their lives were being decided. On all sides of the atrium, they streamed in, running down staircases and emerging from halls, rushing like wild animals released from an overstuffed pen.

  Gwil threw himself into the thick of the fight. “Demon! Monster!” they screamed, swarming him, wailing him with their clubs. He fought as gently as he could, shoving them back and ripping away their weapons. Enough of these people had gotten killed since the three of them had arrived here. Brothers and sisters, Challe kept saying.

  “Who’re the ones—guh—with Challe?” Gwil shouted.

  A group of clustered voices roared in answer. Gwil sifted through the combatants, tossing aside the hostile ones like ragdolls. He probably hadn’t needed to ask—it was the ones who weren’t attacking him that were friendly.

  Eventually, he rearranged the battle so that the ones loyal to Challe (of which there were far less) were positioned alongside and behind him. But things were getting messier as the ordinary folk continued pouring in. Faced with the battle and the sight of their dead warriors, most of them hesitated, but a few bold ones were beginning to encroach.

  The hostile warriors were getting frustrated with Gwil’s antics. He was darting back and forth along their frontline, preventing them from gaining any ground by picking them up and throwing them backward.

  “Listen!” he called to the ones helping him. “We’ll deal with these guys. Challe is gonna take care of everything.” He pointed toward the growing crowd surrounding the area. “You all should go do what you can to keep those people safe and not killing themselves.”

  A handful of the warriors did run off to do that, but most just continued fighting, and a few stared at Gwil like he was an idiot. Or maybe a demon.

  Hmph. He turned to the archway. “Challe! Eagle-man!” Gwil screamed. “Get over here right now!”

  Gwil’s Mir twinged, and he decided he’d better hasten things along. He threw his arms out wide and bolstered them with Nirva to the point they felt like steel bars. Then he ran through the hostile warriors, knocking them over and using their bodies to plow through more, like he was shoveling snow. He moved in an erratic pattern, serpentining and making figure ‘8’s, gathering a tangled mass of bodies until just about everyone had been knocked over and taken what he hoped were only minor beatings.

  When he was done, he saw Challe and Quez—along with Cort and Leira—making their way over. Gwil gave Cort a questioning look, and the man answered with a thumbs up. Gwil nodded and set off to find Tezca.

  Leira shouted one last thing. “Gwil, don’t forget to find out about the Oubliette.”

  The atrium’s stacked, jumbled layout was confusing enough, but now, with all these people blocking the sightlines, it was even more difficult to make sense of things. Looking up at the second floor, he couldn’t even recall where he’d jumped down from.

  But then he saw a large group of people fall to their knees. And a bunch more tumbled down a crowded staircase.

  “Fear not, fear not, my Malikauans,” cried a boisterous voice as the crowd parted and a ballooning shadow fell upon them.

  “There you are, you bouncy bastard,” Gwil yelled.

  “Here I am, you treacherous twig,” Tezca said as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “Where is Legs? Is he alright? Go find him, Claws. I will deal with this demon until you return to stab him in the back at the opportune moment. And then we will run away before Yuma arrives.”

  Claws scurried off. Gwil had been about to tell Tezca what happened to Legs—he was glad he hadn’t spoken up yet. He picked up two loose clubs off the floor. Let’s see him jello these.

  “Out of the way, servants—I mean devout worshippers. I, the Elder Warden—I mean Jaguar—will protect you.” He turned around and swatted away bunches of Malikauans. They cleared out of the immediate area, but the appearance of a Jaguar or Warden or whatever had sent them into a tizzy, and more and more came to witness.

  “I’m gonna carve you up like a turkey,” Gwil said.

  “I would make a marvelous turkey,” Tezca said. “Anyone would be blessed to eat my flesh. Thanks to my exquisite diet, my meat is certainly delectable. Ah, damn! I didn’t get the chance to make a list of my favorite turkey-related dishes.”

  “You still owe me the special eggs, too,” Gwil said. “You promised.”

  Tezca stroked his wobbling chin as if actually considering, but—

  “Tezca!” A blinding flash of green light accompanied the scream. In that fleeting moment, all was silent. The storm shuddered. The frenzied Malikauans were stunned, their voices stolen. But the madness resurged.

  Challe came to stand beside Gwil. Though she was no longer wreathed in clouds, her gray eyes crackled green, and the jadestones embedded in her flesh flared with radiance.

  “Ooh, Challe,” Gwil said. “This guy told me he’s the real Elder Warden. The others are all just—”

  “You already told me, Gwil,” Challe said without looking at him. She stared daggers at Tezca. “Where are the other Jaguars? All of you need to be dealt with.”

  When she spoke, Gwil felt the words as a crushing weight against his chest. Tezca’s face jiggled at the ripples of force, and many of the gathered Malikauans collapsed. Outside, the strength of the storm wavered, subject to Challe’s dominion.