Chapter 51: The King in Ash

Perspective: Destiny


"So, he really did that to Bul?" Rose asked with some trepidation as she looked at the mangled skull.

"Yeah," said Warnado. "He got what was coming to him, but… it was kind of scary."

Scary was an understatement. Destiny had seen a lot, but something about the unflinching obedience with which Bul had shattered his own skull had gotten under her skin. His face indicated he was terrified, but his body moved steadily, almost politely, as though he were bowing to some foreign dignitary he was trying to recruit. And Kay had ordered him to do it with gusto.

She saw Warnado pressing his fingers against a set of goggles he'd produced from his robes. With eyes wide as saucers, the kid looked like he'd been punched in the face for the first time. Destiny wanted to feel bad for him but upsetting things happened in their line of work.

"When it rains it pours. You're not a hero if you don't know how to suck it up every once in a while," Anya had once said to her. She wasn't wrong.

As she thought this, she unintentionally shot a dirty look in Astro's direction. He was steadying himself against a wall, muttering to himself in a series of broken gasps. There was someone who could do with Anya's advice. She almost gave it to him, but she remembered how well Jennifer and Warnado reacted to that outlook after the Hill and decided she didn't want a lecture.

She punched him in the arm instead.

"Come on, Kay said to leave the building. Now that we found Rose, that's everyone. Let's go."

He nodded, but the muttering didn't stop, it only seemed to become more frantic and irritating.

"It's too soon… could he have? No… the Book? Is it the Book? … It's the Book. It must be..."

Destiny gritted her teeth. Dumb jerk was losing his head because he was scared of the Book? What right did he have?

"That thing tried to gaslight me when I was grieving… I'm the one who should be going nuts about Kay getting too pally with it."

Destiny felt her arm grow cold as preliminary flames began to flicker on her palm, but then stifled them.

They reached the shredded remains of the entrance, the remaining soldiers went first. The purple-flame cordon still ran down the centre of the courtyard, and the battle had simultaneously intensified and calmed down.

Tyron's party were still in the heat of battle, carving through endermen and humans. She could see Amanda on the Dragoknight's shoulder, firing her crossbow adeptly, killing enemy after enemy.

"You've taught her well," Destiny said to Rose.

Destiny could also see Steve and Jennifer fighting their way back to the rendezvous point, apparently having suffered minimal casualties. Their soldiers carried an array of heavy-looking crates with them, so it was mostly the two diamond-clad heroes doing the fighting.

Above the battlefield a second battle raged. Shadow was clashing with the Entity, its manifestations long discarded. How exactly this confrontation played out was difficult to tell for Destiny, whenever her gaze came close to either one, her mind violently rejected what her eyes were telling it.

The mages, however, seemed to have forgotten there was a battle going on at all. All but one, and she was the object of their attention. Like ships in a whirlpool, their eyes were drawn to Shadow, and they chanted in jubilance as she fought the Entity.

"What are they doing? Is it a spell?" Destiny asked Rose.

Astro, however, is the one who answered, snapping out of his reverie.

"I told her this would be a bloody problem!" He growled. "I've got to snap them out of this. Destiny, with me."

He grabbed Destiny's arm and flew them over the cordon, coming to settle near one of Shadow's coven - the ones who wore her robes. She was an old woman, but you wouldn't have guessed it from the way she was chanting and ecstatically cheering. Destiny didn't know her name. Astro took her by the shoulders.

"Talita, stop it," He said as he shook her. "We need you here."

Destiny took up watch duty instinctively, summoning icicles and hurling them at any Tower soldier that approached.

"This is the birth of a god! Us mortals should be glad to have the opportunity to witness such a thing!" She hesitated.

"She's not a god, Talita, this is high-level magic, but this is not godhood! You need to focus, people are dying. Our friends are dying."

Destiny brained an endling trying to sneak up on an ecstatic mage.

Talita's eyes drifted from the fight, and she seemed to grow more lucid. A look of disappointment set in, and she began to move again.

"I suppose we shouldn't forget our own mortality in the face of divinity."

Talita set about rousing the other mages.

"By the mods," Astro lamented. "Did it all have to go quite so wrong right this moment?"

"Oh, shut up. We're winning," thought Destiny.

But aloud she said: "When it rains it pours."

They levitated back to the cordon just as Steve and Jennifer approached it. Astro disrupted the flames with a forcefield so they could get across. Jennifer looked troubled as she ushered the men with crates across. Steve came up to them.

"Looks like you guys got the crates no problem," said Warnado.

"You guys look like crap," Steve responded with concern. "What happened?"

"We got ambushed, Claw turned up," explained Destiny. "It was a whole thing."

"Oh Notch!" Steve exclaimed. "Claw's here?"

He raised Excalibur and started looking around. Destiny, remembering the very real possibility that he was still waiting for his moment to strike, followed suit. She resummoned her flaming shield and icy sword.

"Was," said Rose smugly. "I drove him off. Nearly killed him."

"That's a relief," said Steve. Then, to Astro, "Did you succeed in your mission?"

"We have the blueprints," said Astro. "And Marinus Bul is dead."

He gestured to the corpse the soldiers were still carrying towards them

There was a bright flash from the sky as Shadow and the Entity's clash continued, but nothing obvious came of it so they kept talking.

"What about Kay? Where is he?"

"Kay is the one who killed Bul. He's…" Astro trailed off.

Warnado had the goggles out again and was gripping them so tight it looked like they'd shatter at any moment.

"He'll be out in a moment, he wanted to do something," said Destiny.

Tyron's men appeared to be regrouping and drawing back toward the cordon. Destiny pulled out her bow and readied to cover them. Fortunately, the mages had mostly been roused from their rapture and it was becoming readily apparent that the battle was drawing to a close. They would still steal enthusiastic glances at Shadow and the Entity, but they were easily overpowering the battered remains of the facility's garrison.

The enemy mages were all but dead, and the endermen were tired out. Since the Entity arrived, there was no indication of additional reinforcements. That said, that could change.

Just as the last of the men with crates crossed the cordon, they saw what Kay had been up to.

Another flash of light entered Destiny's vision, but it was so much more than a flash. It was a blinding, burning light that forced her eyes closed, sending tears streaming. And as her vision returned, she saw silver-turning-purple flames surging within and without the command centre, filling it and spilling out onto the walls. Three great tendrils of fire spiraled up a large water tank atop the building, and then crushed inwards in a great, hissing mass of steam and broken metal.

And the flames did not stop at the command centre, they lashed across the courtyard, towards the warehouse and began to wash over it with startling rapidity. As the flames rose, Destiny saw workers run from it, some burning, all screaming.

A skeleton in overalls, flames climbing his back, came running up and began to roll in the dirt before the cordon.

"There are civilians here?!" cried Astro.

"Xylo!" Jennifer yelled.

Astro parted the flames and Jennifer ran up to the skeleton. Warnado doused the flames on his back with a jet of water. Destiny followed uneasily.

Jennifer tried to calm him and offer him a healing potion, but the skeleton batted it from her hand and backed up.

"They take what they want and kill who they like, huh?!" spat the skeleton. "Bastards all of you!"

"He didn't know!" Jennifer cried out fruitlessly as he stormed off to help his friends. She looked to Astro. "He couldn't have known about the civilians, could he? How could… We should have warned him."

Steve took her in his arms as she tried to rationalise it, placing his chin on her pauldron and squeezing tight. Astro looked away darkly, flame reducing half his face to a silhouette. Destiny wished she could comfort Jennifer, as Jennifer had once tried to comfort her back in the village, but she was at a loss.

The warehouse collapsed. The flames were now climbing the walls. The complex behind the command centre was an aurora of purple fire.

The fight in the sky raged on, Shadow and the Entity unaware or uncaring of the destruction beneath them.

Finally, from the purple flames at the entrance of the command centre, he emerged. He was silhouetted, featureless aside from two pinpricks of silver light about the eyes. Then, he cut the air with his sword, and he was illuminated. A burning circlet adorned his temples, and his sword became like an inferno, the blade invisible beneath the tongues of flame. All had stopped, friend or foe, to gaze upon his dreadful image. He smiled serenely.

"No…" came the sad whisper of Astro.

Warnado appeared trapped somewhere between admiration and horror.

The duel in the sky continued unbroken. Destiny wondered if the mage had been right about Shadow attaining godhood - no mortal could ever have afforded to ignore this.

Kay waited for them to notice him, carrying on his serene smile, until his face began to harden. He cut the air with his sword and a wave of fire arced through the air at the duel. There was an explosion, and when the smoke cleared, both combatants were staring down at him. Destiny had no view of their faces, but Shadow was still in her incorporeal shape which hurt to look at, and the Entity's armour was undented.

Kay smirked. And he spoke, with a voice that sounded like flames and multitudes.

"Look at you, Entropy and Order, battling away, barely able to touch let alone harm each other. And totally oblivious to the world around you. I suppose that's the thing about dichotomies, you only see two options. Well, now that you can see this fairly impressive display of power do you see the third path? The fire between you?"

He gestured to the aurora of destruction he had created. It spread across the gates. They were trapped. Destiny started to worry how far ahead Kay was thinking.

"Entity, you are powerful. You have conquered many worlds, and you plan to take many more with this machine of yours. You want to take them all, in fact, grind them down into one crown for you to wear. And yet, for all your centuries and your knowledge and your experience, you cannot see how that would sully it all. Look around you, Nexus is not a world, it's not a capital, it's a dreg heap. Scraps of places in a patchwork quilt with no rhythm or rhyme. Why would it be any different if you add more scraps? This entire place is a folly!"

He paused a moment, squinting.

"Actually, haha, you're reminding me of this old fable they used to tell us as kids. About an old miser who had accumulated great wealth. However, it was all coins and even under his greedy little eye a coin would go missing every now and then. Someone steals it, maybe it slips down between the cushions, and he loses track of this. His wealth is always a little smaller than it would have been otherwise. Now, he is a supremely avaricious man, so he won't let this stand, and he decides the only solution is to melt down his wealth into a single golden ball. He takes the ball, all pleased with himself, and buries it in a field. And every night, he comes back, and he cackles to himself as he stares at the dirt where it's buried, deeply amused at the little trick he's played. His fortune preserved at critical mass, forever.

"Of course, a servant noticed this quirky little habit of his and stole the whole thing. Poor miser never realised - he was never going to dig it up to spend it - so he died believing that ball of gold was there. You're the miser, Entity. That's all you are. A murderous, genocidal, grasping little miser. That's why you stack rooms high with junk. That's why you collect magical anomalies for experimentation. You just want to have things without thought. And, if you're the miser, I reckon I'm qualified to be your crafty servant."

He chuckled to himself.

"So, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to take my friends, we're going to build an army from across the worlds - all the people you've attacked, kidnapped, robbed, tormented - and then I'm going to come back and kill you. And once I've burned your Tower to cinders, once I have incinerated any evidence you were ever here, I will take this melted ball of worlds and make it my kingdom. I will be King in Ash, guardian of the forlorn across all creation."

He raised his sword and grinned. There were some scattered cheers, but they were halting. Warnado tried to force a smile onto his face, but it kept slipping off. Destiny kept eyeing the burning gate.

The Entity remained silent, though Destiny couldn't help but feel it was a silence of cold fury. Shadow merely stared on, her exact reaction was impossible to read, not just because looking at her made Destiny's head hurt.

"Anyway," Kay cackled. "My friends are probably getting worried about when we'll leave. I did accidentally burn down the gate - sorry guys! - but you'll find we have no need of it." Then, to the Entity: "I'll be seeing you."

Tyron, who had approached the cordon and begun to call out to Astro, suddenly shouted he fell into the ground. A silvery, fiery gash sat in the ground where he had stood. Then, Warnado yelped and was gone. Destiny backed up, heart pounding as the rebel army began to be swallowed by these flashes of silver flame. Kay smiled on, eyelids lowered as though he were about to drift off into a pleasant dream.

Then, just as a portal into the void opened beneath her feet and she began to slip momentarily out of the world, Destiny saw a similar rift open and close its jaws on Shadow. Yet, even after the portal closed, the incorporeal mage remained in place. She looked down at the King in Ash and scoffed. The last thing Destiny saw before falling into the portal was Kay's furious eyes as Shadow drifted away into the sky, miles above him and worlds removed from his kingdom of ruins.

Destiny landed on her feet. She was in her room. She heard great clamour in the hall. She ran over to her door and threw it open.

There was much excited talk as a million things happened at once. Amanda and Warnado excitedly embracing and chattered about the craziness of their escape. Urist jovially trying to recruit someone to grab a drink to celebrate their survival and victory. Steve and Jennifer rejoicing as they talked about the impending chance to reunite with their friends. Rose tranquilly explaining her victory over Claw to a confused Lucy, trying to ensure this triumph didn't get washed away in the tide of events. But one conversation stood out, passing under the others.

"He's lost it, it's just like you said. We need to do something," breathed Tyron.

"We need Shadow," said Astro as though signing a death warrant. "He's too far gone."

Then, as the reality settled in of whatever they were talking about, they fell very quiet. They saw Destiny watching them and slipped off into Astro's room.

Destiny pulled the yellow crystal from her pocket and contemplated it.

"King in Ash," Destiny repeated to herself. "We'll see."

She put the crystal away again and went to join Urist for a drink.

As Anya once said, when it rains it pours. Everything always hits you at once. Shadow's powers escalating. Kay's growing megalomania. The inevitability of a confrontation between the two. And the chance to finally fight the Tower on even footing. All in the one evening. It was too much to process. She would choose her side when the time came.