The Way Of Fate

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The changes were immediate. The privileges granted to low-elf Fomorians by Breas were repealed, eviction notices were issued, families returned to their homes, and necessities were distributed to all. Amidst the benevolent work, however, war was taking shape. Forges and bowyers ran fully-staffed eighteen hours of every day in rotating shifts; orders were made for military supplies and boats. Soldiers spent less time in barracks and at ceremonial posts and more time in parade and training. Where there might have been celebration, there was grim determination. Even in the schools and the marketplace there was the understanding that everything was about to change. The fae of Dublin were ready.

Nuada spent his first morning as King fixing the problems left by the old king, and the first afternoon and into the night with generals and tacticians in the war chamber, hovering around maps and figures, determining how best the weak could bring down the mighty.

As soon as she was strong enough to stand, Nuala was at the door of the war chamber, Abe close behind with the child in his arms. "You cannot make this war!" she cried, vehement and upset. She clutched the doorway for support.

Nuada stood and approached her calmly. "You should not be on your feet, sister, you are still weak. Indeed, your Lord Husband does you a disservice in allowing you to be up, and the babe as well."

Abe glowered at him.

"He cannot stop me from standing in your way!"

"You're exhausted and upset. Please, for your sake and that of your child--"

"Do not do this thing," she pleaded as he reached her, his hands on her arms and the stress of the day catching up. "For me. Make peace."

He looked past her to their child. "I have done enough for you. This, I do for those who come after."

She swung at him; by surprise alone was she able to clip him across the chin. "If you came not from the same womb I would doubt the line of your birth. You are too angry, too full of hate, and your hate will kill us all!"

He caught her second swing and restrained her by force. "If I do not do this, we will all die anyway. The time for peace has passed, and all that is left to us is this war. I am more sorry than you can possibly know, that I cannot give you and the child peace. Peace is beautiful, but it cannot be enjoyed without its kin of life and freedom." He kissed her on the forehead, despite her thrashing and protests, then forced her back into the hallway. One arm, he kept wrapped around her; the other, he held out to Abe. "I will keep watch over the child while you attend to his mother. Elven children are very frail in the first days of life, and such stress will only endanger his health. Please."

Abe gazed harshly at the king, but knew he spoke truth. "I will put her to bed, then return for the child." He handed over the tiny bundle with great care, and accepted in return his distraught wife.

"Don't be too long, I fear a war chamber is not the best place for an infant. He should be in his father's arms."

Abe's black eyes widened considerably. Nuada was openly calling him the father of Nuala's son; it was the honourable thing to do, certainly, but was still more than he expected.

Nuada nodded with a sad smile. "Go."

He shuffled the now weeping Nuala back to her room and held her as she cried herself to sleep. Perhaps an hour later, he returned to the war chamber to find the generals departing. Entering, he found the king by himself at the head of the table, sitting slightly hunched and definitely tired, cradling the tiny elf in his arms gently. "Abraham, come and sit with me."

Abe approached the table cautiously, but knew he was in no danger. He took a seat at Nuada's right side.

"This child is the single most important creature in the world, now. I love him more than I have ever loved anyone in all my thousands and thousands of years and I am very glad that he is my son only by blood, and not by right." He waited a beat before continuing, "What I do now, I do for him. I wish to give him a world at peace."

"So you're starting a war?" Abe couldn't help but say.

Nuada smiled sadly. "I will spill every drop of human blood on the planet if it means keeping clean the hands of this child. You will stay here with Nuala and the finest battalion of soldiers, hidden away from all the world. The underground of Dublin will not reveal itself unless the Gods smile upon us and victory is achieved. You will stay and raise this child who will be king, and you will stand regent in his place until he is old enough to rule."

"Regent?"

"I leave in the morning to free the fae citizens of Edinburgh and the streets of that city will run red with the blood of the fallen. If the fallen be fae, then I will be amongst them; my people will not suffer while I sit idly by as my father before me. If the fallen be human, then I will join with the soldiers stationed at Edinburgh and we will free every town and city in Scotland from the humans, then all the isles, then all the world until we be stopped and I be dead."

"You cannot win this fight."

His grimace deepened, and he nodded. "I can do naught else but lose it."

"I have lived in their world for years; there is good with the bad. I have hope for them."

"Abraham, do not take offence when I say that you are wrong and that you are young. I have lived thousands and thousands of years, and I saw them climb out of the caves and devour everything they touched and never be satisfied. In their pride and hunger they now reach even beyond the highest limbs of the Father Tree and grasp at the stars. They now destroy what hope my people have of living; tenacious though we are, resilient though we may be, we will never outnumber them nor should we. No creature has ever been so bold as to step beyond their place in the natural way of things and grow so malignantly, so unstoppably, that like a cancer they will kill the body of the world and in doing so kill themselves. So long as I live I cannot allow them to do so. This world does not belong to them." He held his child closer for a moment, kissing his forehead gently and surrendering a tear or two to the occasion. "He will never look upon me. I will be gone before he opens his eyes to the world. He will never know the face of his sire, and I will never know the voice of my son."

"He will know your face," Abraham promised.

----

The next morning, Nuada left Dublin with a battalion of Tuatha De, trolls, goblins, gnomes, Halflings, dwarves, and any other fae that answered the call to arms. Aside from the royal guard, no citizen was required to fight; of the fifty thousand citizens of the underground, thirty-five thousand took up arms and followed the Dead Prince into battle. Left behind were the children, the elderly, the mothers, a battalion of soldiers, and Abraham.

Right after the last of the soldiers left, Hellboy, Liz, and the boys arrived.

They attended first to Nuala, who accepted their greetings with as much composure as she could find in her heart. After the niceties were finished, she openly asked, "Will you go after him?" In the silence that followed, she continued quite solemnly, "You are his bond-mate now. Perhaps he spoke to you of his plans. He is going to Edinburgh to make war on the humans, and he will either die or kill every last human citizen of the city."

"The municipal government is blocking up the Caves and the entrances on the old closes," Abe explained. "Prince-- ahem, King Nuada is going to the rescue of the underground. He… does not plan to return."

"Wait, does this mean--?" Liz turned to Red and grasped his arm. "If he dies, do you die, now that you're bonded?"

Red looked to Nuala. "I don't know. Will I?"

She pursed her lips a moment, then shook her head slightly. "I do not know. You might."

Hey asshole, you coulda told me you were going to the game. I woulda brought beer.

A few miles away, he felt Nuada smile. Are you coming along, then? It's going to be messy.

Well, I'm sure as hell not going to miss my own death.

So be it. I will wait upon the shore for nightfall to cover our crossing; you have until then to catch up.

Red sighed. "I guess I have to go after him, then. I can't just let him get us both killed."

"Please stop him from starting this war," Nuala pleaded.

He glanced over to Abe, who gave him an unexpected stony look in response. "Abraham?"

"Go after him, Red," he told him quietly. Years of friendship added a silent second order. 'Help him win.'

He looked finally to Elizabeth. "Will you be okay here with Abe and the boys?"

She nodded wordlessly and embraced him, her heart heavy as stone.

---

The Dead Prince entered the city by night, his bondmate and his army following behind. Taken by surprise as they slept, the humans of Edinburgh had no chance. The police, the army-- no one knew what was happening. From Lauriston to Leith, no one understood the knives crossing their throats or the swords through their hearts. No cry lasted long enough to warn the others. The streets ran red with blood as the fae took revenge for centuries of crimes, thousands of souls, and the Dead Prince ran ahead to the Caves.

Nuada and Red smashed down the walls to the Underground and removed rock as fast as they could, stepping into the sickening seven-day-stale air of the tunnels and closes to meet many-score of frightened but largely unhurt fae. Together they climbed up to the street and observed the sickening chaos that remained of the Scottish capitol.

Once the army had reassembled with the survivors of the Underground, they marched out of the city and down to the shore. Bonfires were not lit, but food passed around and songs of mourning were sung for the dead. The mothers, children, and elderly of Edinburgh would travel under the guard of a hundred soldiers to join the underground at Dublin, and the rest of the citizenry would join the army of the Dead Prince. No one celebrated a victory, no boast took wing from any mouth that night.

Hellboy had seen war before. In fact, he'd seen a lot of wars-- World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq… In every war, the soldiers he knew would sing songs about their victories and their battle prowess, their ladies and their homeland. That's what humans did, but not the Fae. To them, the war was not a source of pride, but an act of ultimate failure. Hellboy knew with Nuada's certainty that the Fae would not kill pregnant mothers or the very young, but he was uncertain if this was mercy. It was small comfort to know that the fight sickened Nuada as much as it sickened him.

But he never left Nuada's side. The army made its way across Scotland, splitting into units and committing what was ultimately genocide in city after city, from the highlands to the south of England and from the cliffs of Dover to the point at Holyhead. He knew from television, before there was no more of such a thing, that human society could not wrap its collective mind around what was happening to them. Even when they marched on London, detonating factories and setting fire to the city, newscasters were calling it 'terrorist attacks on an unprecedented scale.'

Bullets and knives often brought down soldiers. On these occasions, the dead would be buried in the countryside or burned if a pyre could be built, holy rites were performed and a funeral was given. The Dead Prince would bid goodbye to the souls of his people and every night he would see them again in his nightmares, and he would know them by name and face. Red saw them, too; too often he awoke to Nuada's screaming. Too often he pinned the noble elf by his arms and held him until he regained his wits and the grief subsided. Nights were long but sleep was short, but Nuada's grief only cemented his resolve; within a month, the British Isles and Ireland were free of the threat of humans.

Nuclear weapons could not destroy them; once finished with a city they abandoned it. Missiles could not target them; they did not have stationary homes. Armies could not fight them; they were impossible to see. No country could keep them out; they were already there. The Gods smiled on the Dead Prince, and humanity lost before they realized there was a fight.

True to his word, Nuada never returned to the underground at Dublin. He returned to the royal seat at Maynooth to regroup for a campaign on the mainland. However, there were messengers awaiting him from every noble house of the Tuatha De. Every message said the same. "The city of ____ at ____ is liberated. The house ____ stands ready with ____ soldiers to do the will of the Dead Prince."

The shock of it took almost a full day to process. His generals tallied soldiers and revised charts. Rather than just the islands, he was studying maps of continents. A few cities still stood: Tokyo, Huandong, Moscow, Mumbai, Helsinki, Houston, Mexico City, and San Antonio. South America, Africa, and Australia were trouble territories, and the Fae had no interest in driving the humans out entirely. Instead, measures were taken to cut off human-dominated areas and destroy any lines of trade or transport in or out.

Nuada was not content to sit at Maynooth, however; he travelled with his army, reinforcing local Fae guerrillas wherever he could. It was after the fight in Houston that he called an end to the fighting. Injured but not fatally, he took a place on a high freeway overpass to watch the rest of the fight. Leaning heavily on the cement barrier separating the traffic lane from a four-story deadfall at the end of the bridge, he watched the last skyscraper crumble to a pile of steel and glass. Gnomes with their explosives were surely enjoying the opportunity to make a mess, at least. Danji would probably be with them. "This is the last fight," he declared quietly. "The other cities, we will leave standing. Six billion, one hundred seventy six thousand, five hundred and twenty-seven souls." He sank to his knees but still watched over the barricade.

Hellboy sat with his back to the sight, hand covering his face, hunched over in shame. "The man I called father was human. Friends. My wife. Oh God…" he pulled his hand away from his face and considered the prayer beads and crucifix wrapped around his wrist. "What have we done, Silverhand?"

"What we were forced to do. It was them, or the world."

"I know, it's just… I wish…" He pulled his knees up slightly and folded his arms over them, burying his face but not crying.

Nuada turned and sat beside him, good hand on his shoulder. "I know."

"The funny thing is, before I stopped you from awakening that damned army, Elizabeth and I met the Angel of Death in the dead city. The Angel said I would bring about the destruction of the world." He chuckled bitterly. "And that Elizabeth would suffer more than anyone. Guess that's about right."

"She is an orphan now," Nuada observed.

"She's been an orphan most of her life. But now it's worse. Will everyone-- will they still accept her?"

"They shall, or my sister will revoke their right to own property," he promised.

"What do we do now?"

He thought about this for awhile, as the sun set somewhere beyond where cars used to drive, joggers used to burn calories, and prom dates used to lose their virginity. "I don't know. The last time this happened, I went into exile for four and a half thousand years. I suppose… You should go back to your wife and boys. I'll wait until you're across the ocean, then you'll lose your link to me."

"Wait, why should-- oh hell no you're not, you slippery little bastard, you don't get to commit suicide and leave me to go completely out of my damn mind all by myself. You're coming with me."

Nuada nodded. "You are right. It would be wrong of me to abandoned you."

A long silence passed between them. The stars came out over the land where there used to be traffic jams and shopping malls, public schools and strip clubs, white supremacists and non-denominational churches. Red sniffed. "I guess you didn't need that fucking army after all."

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Author's Note: Boy am I ever sad to see this one end. That is, by the way, why I didn't update forever and a day-- I really didn't want this to be over. However, it's where I wanted it to be; fates are finished, references made, and legends completed. There's where I've thrown my gauntlet, friends; now I look forward to reading what you all write.