by Jack Heckel
I tried to assume a defensive posture and started to weave a spell around the throne dais, but the battle-axe would not be denied. Somehow, and I still do not know how, Justice Cleaver was in my hands, and I was charging toward Cravock. I’m fairly sure that the battle-axe made me do it, although perhaps I had gone mad. Regardless, I found myself in the middle of the fight. Unfortunately, I was still me. I had no idea what I was doing.
Cravock saw me holding Justice Cleaver, and a light of vengeance came into his eyes. “You are not a warrior, massster,” he hissed. “Now, it isss my time. There will be no more Dark Lord! No more Dark Queen! No more sssniveling! I am Cravock the Terrible and no man can defeat me!”
Whether you think he’d gotten a big head or not, he drove Valdara back, and then, swinging Death Slasher in spinning circles above his head, he slashed at my neck. Had it only been me fighting, the story, or at least my part in it, would have ended there. But I felt a jerk in my arms and Justice Cleaver blocked the blow. The parry saved my life, but the shock of its force jarred the battle-axe from my grasp. It fell to the ground at the feet of Valdara.
“What are you doing?” Justice Cleaver shouted. “We’re in a duel for all existence, battle-axe versus battle-axe. If my wielder loses, I lose. Someone pick me up!”
Thankfully, and I mean everyone in Trelari should be thankful, I never got the chance. Valdara grabbed Justice Cleaver. She whirled it through the air, getting a feel for its weight, testing its balance.
“Thank goodness!” said Justice Cleaver. “You should have been holding me in the first place. Now, let’s see what the world’s greatest warrior can do with the world’s greatest magical weapon.”
“Agreed,” she said with determination.
“Prepare for justice, lizard!” shouted Justice Cleaver.
Valdara took the offensive, swinging the battle-axe back and forth, in tighter and tighter arcs, giving her larger foe little time to adjust. Despite his reptilian strength, Cravock was slowly being driven back. I nearly cheered and then realized he was retreating right into the teeth of his army. As good as Valdara was, and as powerful as Justice Cleaver claimed to be, there were too many of them.
I ran to Vivian, who still sat stunned on the throne. “You’ve got to stop this,” I shouted, shaking her. “This is your army. Order them to stand down.”
“I want to,” said Vivian in a dazed, almost drugged voice. “But I can’t, Avery. I don’t want to. I think maybe that I’ve lost my mind.” She began laughing hysterically while tears streamed down her cheeks.
I turned back to the battle. It was not going well. With the army at his back, Cravock was pushing forward against Valdara. The company had formed a tight circle on the lowest stair of the throne. The orcs and hobgoblins were paying a heavy price for each foot they gained, but still they advanced. Ariella, who was standing below me, had exhausted her supply of arrows and had taken to casting her cold spell, freezing groups of the enemy in place. But the potency of each blast was growing weaker. The time had come for me to do something; I just didn’t know what. I knew a lot of spells I could cast, but my education had never included combat. I was out of my depth. I was still considering what to do (perhaps a wall of flames) when there was a blue flash at the edge of the throne and about a half-dozen blood orcs toppled over. Sam stepped through the hole created in the lines.
“I found the key!” he shouted, and to my wonderment he held aloft the silvered key of Trelari.
I ran to him. “Sam, let me have it,” I said, grasping at the key in his hand.
He pushed me back and shook his head. “I can’t trust you, Avery.”
“Sam, I need that key,” I pleaded. “I can stop all this.” I held out my hand. It was shaking.
“You’re right not to listen to him,” Vivian said in voice that was sweet and reasonable compared to mine. She had come down the stairs and was standing to my right, looking more like the girl I’d met in Mysterium than the Dark Queen. “He is the Dark Lord, the Father of all Lies, and he has lied to you from the first. Give the key to me and you shall rule beside me for all time.”
Sam looked at us both with disgust.
In dismay I saw the company retreat another step up the stairs. I considered trying to wrest the key away from him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and wasn’t sure I’d win the fight anyway. “Please, Sam. I only became the Dark Lord to bring peace and stability to this world.”
“As did I!” Vivian said, and she lunged at him, snatching at the key.
Sam pulled a pinch of sand from his pouch and blew it in her face. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she toppled forward, unconscious. Seeing her on the ground, her expression frozen in a twisted mask of desperate need and her grasping hand still outstretched like a claw, I realized she was right. There was no difference between us. I understood at last what Valdara meant when she said that intentions didn’t matter.
“You’re right not to trust us,” I said, and sat down heavily on the stair.
The clanging of battle-axes reminded me that Valdara was still dueling Cravock, and the screams of the company and guttural shouts of the blood orcs reminded me that there was still a battle going on, and that we were losing. An idea came to me.
I sprang back to my feet and shouted, “You need to use the key, Sam!”
He considered for a moment and asked, “How?”
“All you have to do is imagine an effect and will it to happen.”
I hoped I was right and that he could. Normally someone from a place like Trelari wouldn’t have the reality density needed to use the key, but with Trelari having moved ever closer to Mysterium, I wondered if there was that much difference between us anymore.
He pointed the key at a group of hobgoblins that were pressing hard against Seamus and Rook. There was a flash and the hobgoblins froze in place. “Wow!” he said, a reasonable reaction in my opinion.
“Now, expand the effect . . .”
He was already way ahead of me. I saw him close his eyes. The key glowed, and the hobgoblins and orcs disappeared entirely. At least, I thought they’d disappeared until I saw the tiny piles of ash scattered about the throne room floor.
The larger war may have been over, but the duel between Valdara and the lizard raged on. The battle-axes sparked as they crashed together. “Great work, Sam!” I shouted. “Now get Cravock!”
Sam shook his head and tucked the key back into his pouch. “Valdara doesn’t need this,” he said. “She is the best among us.”
“She is, but what if something happens?” I pleaded.
Sam locked eyes with me. “Sometimes we need to fight our own fights, Avery. Believe in her. You should too.”
He was right, of course. It was precisely my own desire to help that had given rise to the Dark Lord, and it had been Vivian’s desire to do the same that had transformed her into the Dark Queen. It was well past time for Mysterians to give the people of Trelari a chance to fight their own fights.
And so I watched as Valdara and Cravock continued their deadly dance. At the outset it seemed that Sam’s faith was well placed. She had backed the lizardman up against a wall. But just as Valdara seemed to be about to end the duel, he lashed out with his tail, wrapping it around her leg, and pulled her to the ground. In a blur, she rolled out of the way of his descending axe and jumped to her feet. Cravock charged, Death Slasher held high overhead. She spun to the side, and with a brilliant backhand stroke, Valdara sliced through Cravock’s neck. His head tumbled to the ground, wide-eyed with disbelief. As the lizard’s body fell to the ground, I felt myself relax. It was done and no one had died . . . ignoring Cravock and the hundreds of orcs and hobgoblins that had been massacred of course.
“And so,” said Justice Cleaver, his voice echoing in the now near empty throne room, “once and for all, I have proven that I am the greatest battle-axe in all history!”
“Are you always going to talk?” asked Valdara still breathing heavily from the fight.
�
��Yes.”
She sighed. And then she was engulfed by the embraces of the others.
I sat alone on the throne next to the unconscious Vivian. I was happy for them, but overhead the storm continued to build. Through the upper windows, I could see lightning streaking across the sky as thunder shook the keep.
That’s strange, I thought. The storm should have ended.
Across the room, Death Slasher’s eye stared at me with the same malevolence I remembered from my days as the Dark Lord.
That’s even stranger. Death Slasher should have ceased to be.
For some reason we hadn’t won yet, and I didn’t know why.
Chapter 32
THE FINAL SACRIFICE
“Um, guys,” or something of the sort was the first thing I said, but I said it way too softly for them to hear. Looking back that was probably by design, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say after that, and after a moment’s consideration, I was thankful that they hadn’t heard me. In fact, I was so uncertain about what to do or say about what hadn’t happened with Cravock’s defeat that I sat next to the unconscious Vivian and stared up at the storm and I thought for a while as the others told their versions of what had happened and what they had done, and began the wonderful process of making it all grander and better.
My thoughts took me back to the beginning, back to my closet of an office in the sub-basement of the Subworld Studies building where I had first conceived of the reality matrix spell. As with all really good ideas, it came from having no clue about what to do for a dissertation research project.
It was afternoon and I was tired, and found myself staring at a wonderful picture of deep subworld space that Eldrin had taken it a few days before. I wasn’t really thinking anything specific when the beauty of it all struck me, and it made me sad. I’m sure someone at some point has made the connection between beauty and sadness, and made it eloquently. I’m not going to do that except to say that seeing all those lovely swirls of light got me to thinking about the paper I was supposed to be studying, a copy of which was sitting unread on the desk in front of me.
The paper was a dry statistical analysis of subworld extinction rates by aura color. I can’t explain it, but the author had some weird theory about burnt-umber having some significance to predicting stability. I remember nothing of the paper, which may be because I only ever managed to get through the abstract, but I do remember feeling sad that so many of Eldrin’s swirls were going to vanish. That got me wondering about why they vanish, and that eventually led me to Professor Griswald’s survey paper on the subject. I was hooked.
What I found most interesting was that while there was a lot of literature on subworld extinction—the numbers and the possible whys—there was next to nothing on intervening in such extinctions. What was more, most previous attempts to prevent the collapse of a subworld had met with failure. In a flash I had my dissertation topic; now all I had to do was come up with magic that could do what had never been done before.
As my knowledge grew deeper I began to notice patterns in extinction events. One that intrigued me was the fact that worlds that disintegrated released huge amounts of reality energy. (Sometimes it is helpful having a roommate who is a bit compulsive about observing subworld collapse.) My original theory was that if you were able to etch a magical construct into the reality pattern of a world that allowed the world to use the energy of its own decline to renew itself, you would have a world that could exist, in theory, in perpetuity.
And so I set out to create what I call a reality matrix that would do just that. I would set an end point (peace and stability), and as the decay energy increased, the reality matrix would redirect that energy back into the world’s own pattern in a positive feedback loop that would ultimately lead to stability. On the ground what that meant was that the forces of decay and decline would have to be accelerated and concentrated so that they could be converted, in that final moment, into a world stabilizing force. What I termed a golden age.
Great theory, but as I have revealed previously, in practice I found it impossible. The power of the world on its own was simply not strong enough to etch the new pattern. So I cheated. I created a spell kernel out of Mysterium magic (Death Slasher). Then to make sure the pattern was fully and truly etched into reality, I myself oversaw the initial formation of the reality matrix as the Dark Lord. This meant . . .
I sat up with a start. The truth was staring me in the face, and so were Valdara and Drake and the rest of the Company of the Fellowship.
“Why is the battle-axe still here?” Valdara asked.
“Because I am eternal!” declared Justice Cleaver.
“Not you,” she barked. “I’m talking about Death Slasher.” She pointed across the room, and the evil battle-axe glared back at us.
“He is as nothing,” Justice Cleaver assured her. “You can ignore him now.”
Everyone was waiting for me to answer, but I was trying to wrap my head around what my revelation meant.
“Maybe it’s because Vivian is still alive,” Sam suggested, and nudged her with his foot to make sure she wasn’t dead.
Drake picked her up by the front of her dress and growled, “It wouldn’t take much to snap her neck.”
I looked at Drake, St. Drake the Pure, now suggesting that they snap the neck of a woman who was defenseless. I couldn’t help but think of how he, of all people, had gone wrong after the “defeat” of the Dark Lord. And that, by the way, segues nicely into my epiphany: The Dark Lord had never been defeated. Not really.
Drake knew he hadn’t defeated the Dark Lord. That was what had broken his faith and sent him down a spiral that had changed him into the man he was now. If Drake knew, then the reality matrix certainly knew. I was the key to everything, because I was the Dark Lord. I had woven myself into the experiment and thus into the story of Trelari. The reality matrix could not be complete until I was destroyed.
I had to die.
Because I’ve been trying to be completely honest with you, I have to tell you that my immediate reaction was To hell with that. To my credit though, my very next thought was Coward.
If I lived, then every Trelarian, and because of how she’d been caught by the reality matrix spell, Vivian herself, was going to have to suffer. Trelari would not stabilize. Its reality pattern would fray and the world would march from cataclysm to cataclysm and terror to terror until at last its pattern disintegrated and the world vanished from creation. I really had to die. Which was heavy.
“Drake, please let her go,” I said before I had fully come to terms with my decision. “She’s not to blame, and killing her wouldn’t solve the problem.”
“And remind us why we’re listening to you, Dark Lord?” Seamus snarled.
There were nods all around at this question, and it was a fair one. “Because I’m going to tell you how to get rid of Death Slasher and the reality storm, and it will cost you nothing of value.”
“No lies?” Valdara asked, or maybe it was a command, because she was pointing Justice Cleaver at my throat.
I chuckled bitterly. “If only.”
There followed a moment of silence while they waited for me to say something else, and during which my courage failed me—repeatedly.
“Okay, kid,” Drake said finally. “You’ve got our attention. Are you going to tell us your plan, or are you going to make me beat it out of you?”
I looked at him and sighed. I hoped when this was all over that he would find his faith again. Because he was a miserable drunk. I locked my eyes on his and said, “You have to really defeat me.”
Drake’s eyes narrowed briefly at that and then his eyebrows shot up in shock. His expression told me that he understood completely. He dropped Vivian and took a stumbling step backward like I’d struck him.
If Drake understood, the others were still confused. “And what happens when you’re defeated?” asked Seamus.
I blinked. “When I am defeated everything will be set right. The fo
rtress will fall. The armies will be swept away. The storm will clear. Death Slasher will be no more. A golden age will begin.”
“So, surrender yourself, laddie,” barked Rook.
“It’s . . . it’s not that simple, Rook,” I said, unable to stop the catch in my voice.
Valdara’s green eyes had never left my face since we’d started talking. Now she too seemed to understand, although she was uncertain. She walked over to where Death Slasher lay and picked it up. I could see Justice Cleaver quivering with rage at this. She deposited the weapon at my feet.
“What if we fight?” she asked, and twirled Justice Cleaver in her hands. “If I disarmed you . . .”
“No.” I shook my head. “I just need you to . . .” I looked up at her and pleaded silently that she not make me finish.
“No,” she choked.
“You have to,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Can someone tell me what he’s talking about?” Sam shouted.
Valdara’s voice was full of anger and frustration. “He wants us to kill him.”
“Avery?” Ariella asked.
“Well, ‘want’ may be too strong a word . . .” I said, because I can be sort of an ass sometimes.
The entire group started speaking at once. Seamus and Rook began arguing about the real meaning of “defeat.” Seamus seemed to be pro-killing and Rook anti-, but I can’t be sure because there were so many dwarf curse words thrown in it was hard to follow. Ariella and Sam were shouting about different spells that they had heard of that might place me in a death-like state. Luke put his head in his hands. “I wish I were somewhere far, far away.” Drake and Valdara stood in a silent embrace.
I marveled at these people. Whereas a few minutes ago the entire company, almost without exception, would have gladly sliced me from throat to belly, now that I was giving myself to them of my own accord they seemed determined to find any other way out. And that, I reflected, is why they’re heroes.
I let them argue for a time until a streak of lightning caught my attention. I looked up. The storm, which had been unhappily spinning above us, had now begun to descend in a swirling vortex. Reality was not happy. I slowly picked up Death Slasher, avoiding the eye’s gaze. I did not want that to be my last vision.
