Hello! I know it's been a long time, but here is the Epilogue! Just a quick warning: I posted the last chapter and the epilogue together, so there is a possibility that you skipped a chapter before this. Go check it out! It's kinda an important chapter.
Epilogue
They stood on the elegant streets of Hódmezővásárhely, Hungary, arms linked in the semblance of a couple on a stroll, now frozen, transfixed, watching the inferno rising in the near distance.
Lukas had decided that while it may be more prudent to vary his methods, this was the most effective way of destroying an Underworld base completely. Though the various explosions and bombings around the world had attracted international attention, the attacks were random and sporadic enough that governments are still contemplating the possibility of a new terrorist organization who, for some reason, was only targeting an international corporation named UDW, not realizing that it was basically just a one-man job.
Five, if you also counted the one man's trainer, weapons provider, and pilots.
And the only people who knew that it was only Lukas—and who were threats to him—were no more than ashes and rubble.
Magyar stole a glance at Lukas, his icy blue eyes reflecting the violent fire and dark smoke less than two hundred meters away. He tensed as the sirens of police cars, firetrucks, and ambulances drew closer, did not relax when the sound grew fainter. A little fondly, she pressed a finger between his eyebrows, smoothing out the little crease there.
"Don't look so unhappy," she said, somewhat teasingly, tone too bright for the circumstances. "Your mother would be proud."
Lukas' expression of disdain did not ease. "My other would not be proud of a killer."
Magyar raised an eyebrow, cast her gaze towards the smoke-shrouded sky. She hugged his arm closer, resting her head on his shoulder. Sometime in the past five years, he had grown taller than her.
Lukas, as with every time Magyar touched him, felt a twinge in his back, a reminder of the scars carved into his skin all those years ago by the very woman beside him. Those crudely-shaped words would haunt him forever, because even if he did not know Hungarian, he knew now what they meant.
"Emlékezz az Északi Varázslóra."
Remember the Magician of the North.
"That would be rather hypocritical of her," Magyar said finally. "She was such a good one herself."
"Where are we going?" Lukas asked as he clipped on his seat belt. Alfred's off-tune voice was singing along to some Lady Gaga song, while his copilot's voice—practically inaudible—was also humming to the tune.
"Korea," Magyar replied.
Lukas frowned. "We've already been to Korea."
"Last time we were at Busan. This time we're heading towards Seoul."
"Why?"
Magyar grinned, plopping into the seat beside him and securing her own seat belt as the small, private plane began to glide. "I've discovered something interesting."
Lukas waited for her to expound, but she only spoke up again after the plane's course was smooth in the air.
"I've told you before that two brothers replaced China after he died, but their whereabouts are unknown. In fact, most people don't know their real identity. I've only met them once, and that was when they were still brats trailing after China like homeless puppies."
Lukas nodded. He had heard this several times before; this was the answer she gave him whenever the question of who now led the Underworld came up. For her to bring it up so suddenly...
"You tracked them down," he realized.
She nodded, her smile pleased. "Happy Birthday!"
"About time. Took you long enough." He paused. "My birthday was last month."
Magyar was unimpressed. "Just be thankful I decided to try, kid. Speak to me like a sullen teenager again and I'll give you something to be grumpy about."
Lukas rolled his eyes. "So they are at Seoul."
"They will be at Seoul," Magyar corrected. "They are preparing to board a plane from Kazakhstan. We'll be crossing paths, if everything goes according to plan."
"And what is this plan?"
Magyar looked wickedly delighted, and Lukas knew immediately that it was not going to be fun. She tossed him a pack—which turned out to be a parachute pack—and a strange device that reminded him of a drone with several spikes at seemingly random places.
"We sabotage their plane."
And if anyone suspected that the plane crash over northern China was related to the international bombings...
Well, it wasn't like there was any proof.
There never was.
They were down to the last bottle.
It was annoying when that happened, though it happened every week. Today was Saturday, and tomorrow morning, Andrei or Nikolai or Maksim would trek out into the blizzard with the dogs and drag back another sled-full of alcohol, but at that moment, they would have to make do with the one.
The three of them were currently huddled around a stove in the monitor room, passing the single bottle around and taking gulping sips that gave the illusion that they were not drinking that much when in truth, they were nearly halfway through.
This bottle was not going to get them through the night.
A sobering thought, not that they were supposed to be drunk. The screens lining the walls on one side of the room blinked and flickered amongst the many eyes around the Tiksi base. It had always felt a little useless, placing cameras around the base that wasn't really even in Tiksi, but perched on the far outskirts of the city, where there was basically nothing. Of course, there were also cameras within the base, but at the current hour, they showed nothing but empty halls and rooms.
Never mind the cameras. They felt useless, huddled around the stove with a single lukewarm bottle and staring at white screens.
However, they knew that the precaution was necessary. Tiksi may just about be the most neglected Underworld base in the world (save for the one in Antarctica, which was only halfway constructed before being abandoned), but even they knew that someone was targeting the bases, and so far, they had no idea who the culprits were.
Or maybe they did. It was difficult to imagine the Underworld not knowing anything, considering how widespread it was, but either way, the information did not reach the Tiksi base, and so Andrei, Nikolai, and Maksim were stuck in the dark, and in the cold, and in the vodka-less base at the edge of a city in the middle of Siberia.
Honestly, there would be no point in attacking the Tiksi base either. It wasn't like there was anything here. There were just the occasional recruits-in-training, maybe some scientists holed up in the labs, a pathetic number of guards (five), and a few dozen unnecessary cameras all over the place. Whoever attacking the bases would have to be very bored or very determined to come to Tiksi, and even then, it would probably be the very last choice of destruction.
Maksim passed the bottle to Nikolai, who cradled it but did not drink. Andrei eyed the bottle in Nikolai's hands, but the silence was too thick to break, so he settled to waiting for the other to pass it on, fidgeting in his seat and glancing listlessly at the flickering screens.
And glanced again.
And squinted.
"What," he said, and pointed.
"What?" Maksim and Nikolai squinted as well in the direction of the finger, which was actually quite unhelpful because it pointed at the screens of cameras looking out at the landscape of the base, and they were currently in a snowstorm, so everything was a blowing, twisting mass of white.
"There." Andrei's finger became more persistent, straightening accusingly.
"Where?" Nikolai's face was all scrunched up—his vision had never been particularly good, and the room was dark—and he slowly brought the bottle to his lips, taking a swig through pinched lips.
"I don't see anything," Maksim added, noting how artistically the snow seemed to swirl in the camera lens, like patches of darkness blooming and swelling and vanishing behind a curtain of fluttering white wings.
"There, goddammit!"
And then they saw it.
The figure came rising out of the darkness. It seemed to be a part of the dance in the nature surrounding the Tiksi base, flickering and flurrying and fading. But once you saw it, it was undeniably there, and it was undeniably human.
"Fuck," swore Maksim.
Andrei leapt into action, springing up fast enough to knock over his stool, locating the screen and all the eyes close to the area, turning them towards the figure, zooming in.
Nikolai cradled the bottle. "This feels like a horror movie."
"It looks like a ghost," Maksim agreed, as the resolution of the cameras focused and cleared. Though the snowstorm made it hard to get a more accurate image, the figure was clearly male, and clearly alone.
Andrei frowned. "What..." He didn't continue. There were so many questions that he didn't know where to start, nor even how to ask them. It was just a haze of confusion that enveloped the three guards, all of whom were transfixed as the figure advanced, pale hair whipping around a narrow face, stride unfaltering as if the blizzard around him did not exist.
They watched until the person was close enough that his eyes were dark points on his face, and then Andrei—the oldest of the three of them—inhaled sharply.
"I know that face," he said.
Maksim and Nikolai managed to tear their gazes away to stare at the older man, a veteran of the civil war and whatever was before the civil war.
"It's the Magician of the North."
The name meant nothing to Maksim, but Nikolai's eyebrows shot up. "The Magician of the North is a woman. That—He—is not."
"No," Andrei replied simply, and said nothing more.
Maksim glanced at the screen again, the figure now an alarming and dangerous shadow bearing towards the base. "Um... This Magician of the North—friend or foe?"
"Ghost," said Nikolai.
"Maybe we should sound the alarms?" Maksim suggested somewhat weakly.
Andrei jolted a little, as if remembering for the first time that their job was to sound the alarm in case of suspicious intruders. He turned and blinked a little bewilderedly at them, and then Nikolai shouted, "The fucking alarms, Kozlov!"
A palm slammed into the big, red button (because of course it was the big, red button), and the sirens began to screech.
But Maksim, through it all, continued to stare at the screens, hands frozen in the act of reaching for the warm stove, transfixed as the person continued onwards despite the storm, despite the possible dangers lying in his path towards and inside the Tiksi base. It was a march, a striding rhythm that left no room for doubt, for fear, for failure, for death.
It was the march of the butcher to the bloody table.
And this was how Maksim knew that he—and everyone else—was going to die.
But only when he was burning, and everything around him was burning, and it was pain beyond consciousness, pain that he could barely feel because he was dying, would Maksim realize that Tiksi was truly the last stop, the last bit left of the Underworld.
Because it was burning, and the Magician of the North—or whoever this man with the face of a legend was—was burning with it.
It was a beautiful image, the solitary, pale figure standing at the heart of the fire he had set to burn down a world, and as Maksim choked on smoke and ash and blood, he watched the Magician of the North reach up to the flying sparks, the dancing embers, eyes bright with wonder as his gold-spun hair alighted into a blazing crown around his head.
It was not a bad last sight before death.
Tiksi was the end. The final thread of Mathias's dream. The Underworld had been completely eradicated.
Magyar pursed her lips. In all these years, she had never managed to convince Lukas that Mathias's dream had not been to destroy the Underworld, but to recreate Paradizo.
But what was done, was done. The dead will remain dead, the burnt, burnt. Ashes will fall, civilizations will rise, and the past will one day be buried in the grave before history repeats itself once more.
A somber thought. Magyar contemplated cracking open the bottle she knew was hidden in the back of Alfred and Matthew's plane, but then placed a hand on her belly, and changed her mind.
Alcohol was no longer a luxury she could afford, not when another life depended on her self-control.
Sighing, Magyar took to checking the clock on her phone. Seven a.m. Four hours later than when Lukas promised to return.
And then she remember that it had been three days. Three days and four hours.
Lukas never returned.
Sighing once more, Magyar punched in Roderich's number. It only rang once before he picked up.
"I'm coming home," she said.
Some of her brokenness must have seeped into her voice, because Roderich was momentarily silent.
Then, he asked, "What about him?"
Magyar glanced out the narrow plane windows. The Russian winter sky was whiter than snow, distant clouds gray. But she could also see patches where the sun managed to struggle through, weak yet vivid, like drifting wisps of fine, gold-spun hair.
"I suppose..." she began, "I suppose he's already there."
"I see."
Home was where the heart was, after all.
~The End~
Thank you all for sticking through all this! I know that it has been very confusing, and it kinda just sputtered out in the end, but I still had a lot of fun with this series.
Originally, I wanted to have a third part of this series, called Lost and Found, which will explore the backstories of many minor characters and the history of the Underworld and basically all the characters would have a part in there. However, I don't know if anyone wants to read it in the first place, it's kinda an optional project, so I will only write it if people request for it (which people probably won't, haha).
Thank you to all my reviewers though! You are truly what brought me to the end of this fic, and I'm really grateful and happy. Once again, thank you all for reading!