Lindon turned to his father. “You asked me why I didn’t come back. Why would I come back?”
No one responded.
Dross gestured for him to keep going.
“I’m only here now because you’re in danger. If I hadn’t come back, you would have all died without knowing anything. Stick with me, and I’ll protect you, because I can. While you’re with me, you’ll never have to worry about anything ever again.”
He turned his back to them and grabbed the door handle. “But first, I’m taking you away from Sacred Valley whether you like it or not. After that, if you want to crawl back here and die, you can do it on your own.”
Distracted, he pulled the door instead of pushing.
Lindon pulled the handle out with a snap. The entire door cracked down the side, and even the doorframe bent inward.
He almost apologized. Instead, he tapped into his soulfire and just blew the remaining door off its hinges.
Before the splinters had fallen to the ground, he was gone.
He didn’t realize where he was going until he found Yerin sitting with Mercy and Orthos, a spoon halfway to her mouth.
Dross may have said something to her without informing Lindon, or maybe she just read it on his face. She dropped her bowl, following him to a lonely corner just outside the Fallen Leaf School.
When he was sure they were alone, Lindon broke down and wept.
8
Tal’gullour, Fortress of the Mad King
Daruman clenched his Scythe and focused his authority, preparing to re-enter the Way.
He had to be careful. He couldn’t bring his fortress with him, and without Tal’gullour to contain his power, the entire Way would sense his movement. When he entered an Iteration, the very stars trembled.
With every step he took, the eyes of the Abidan would be upon him.
He could warp Fate by nature of his authority over chaos, and thus dodge the noses of the Hounds. If he could move without the Spiders detecting him immediately, he would have brought the Abidan system down before.
A dark voice laughed, unrestrained, in the depths of his soul. A voice so familiar that it was almost indistinguishable from his own.
You tried, once, the Conqueror reminded him.
Unbidden, the Fiend Oth’kimeth summoned up the memory of Daruman’s most painful defeat.
He had spent centuries gathering the right ingredients. He personally retrieved the Mask of the Unweaver from an Assassin Idol’s Temple in the fragment of a dead world. He traded with the Angler for an invisibility cloak she had woven with her own hands when she was a mortal. A world he conquered brought him tribute of the greatest artifacts ever forged in their Iteration, including a conceptual spirit of stealth who could hide from Fate itself.
And, in one of his greatest triumphs, he had raided the personal collection of the Third Judge of the Abidan Court: Darandiel, the Ghost. He had taken from her a band of silver bound with living runes, designed to allow even a Judge to veil their power.
His greatest craftsman, gathered from dozens of dead worlds, labored for years to break these items down to their conceptual essence and combine them together.
After thirty years, they forged his four priceless treasures into a device that would hide the very origin of his existence. It resembled a living, shifting thread made from smoke and shadow, which swirled around him in a twisting cocoon.
As they looked upon him, even his closest advisors could not recognize him. He was as a void in reality itself.
With his Origin Shroud upon him, he took a step into reality.
Into Iteration 216. The world called Limit.
Even two hundred standard years later, the memory frustrated him. Limit should have been the perfect world to experiment with. It was doomed to fall soon, its population devastated by a mystical plague and the rise of new insectoid monsters. The ecosystem was close to collapsing, and the decline of human lives had already led to steady breakdowns in local physics.
There was no reason for an Abidan to be there. In fact, he arrived over a churning sea without Sector Control contacting a Judge, and he knew he had won.
Oth’kimeth gleefully reminded him of the triumph he had felt in that moment. He had seen himself striding into Haven or Cradle or even Sanctum itself unnoticed, wreaking such devastation before the Judges were recalled that the Abidan would begin to crumble.
It was while he was lost in his own victory that he had felt another presence. A rock-solid presence of order buried beneath the ocean. An Abidan in Limit.
The timing, he felt, was perfect.
His enemy had not noticed him, and he could be upon them with lethal force in an instant. A shark taking a swimmer.
His will bent and tore reality—one more wound among many in the dying world—and he stepped through a hole in space. He found himself in an underground chamber that sheltered millions of local lives.
And he was standing face-to-face with Ozriel.
It was only afterwards that Oth’kimeth, acting in conjunction with his Presence, had reconstructed the image of the Abidan standing there in his black armor, white hair falling around his shoulders, ice-cold look on his face. The Mad King hadn’t seen that at the time.
He had seen only the Scythe.
The first strike of the weapon blasted his mortal form to messy pieces, splattering him across the far wall in one blow.
He had re-formed in an instant, miles overhead, and begun to open a hole into the Void. His Origin Shroud was still intact, as Ozriel hadn’t unleashed the full force of his Scythe.
Ozriel was hiding too. That was his only saving grace.
If he removed his Shroud and released his full power, so would Ozriel, and the remaining Judges would be on him in moments.
How had Ozriel known?
Even two hundred years later, Daruman couldn’t figure it out. Had he really seen so far, through chaos-corrupted Fate?
At the time, he had been convinced that there had been some flaw in his Origin Shroud. If he could get away and fix it, he could try again.
But Ozriel had followed him.
They had traded blows in the sky, enough to tear space and strain the already-weak fabric of the Iteration, but neither at their full power.
Otherwise, their first exchange would have torn the planet in half.
Daruman had finally managed to keep his void portal open long enough to escape, but then Ozriel had spoken to him.
Oth’kimeth made sure he remembered the statement in Ozriel’s own smug and icy tones.
“I can let you run…but I can’t let you keep that.”
The authority of Ozriel’s Scythe focused on Daruman’s Origin Shroud, and there was nothing he could do. The spinning thread of shadows and smoke was torn from him, its pieces drifting back into Limit as he himself fell into the Void.
So he couldn’t even forge it again.
Oth’kimeth had been laughing at him about it for two hundred years.
You had to wait until Ozriel was gone. You creep around like a mouse because you cannot stride like a lion.
I can now, Daruman countered.
And he tore his way from the Void into a world. The Abidan called it Iteration One Twenty-nine: Oasis.
Reality screamed around him. Distant stars shook. Prophets and oracles fainted or died where they stood, sensing his presence.
And the fourteen Abidan stationed on this world instantly sent out desperate calls for aid. He couldn’t stop them, but he didn’t need to.
The Mad King had come. He wore his armor carved from the bones of Oth’kimeth’s physical body, and in his right hand he clutched a Scythe of his own.
He no longer had any use for stealth. Let them see him coming.
He would crush them and their defenses together.
Daruman raised his Scythe and reaped Abidan lives.
