Chapter Text
01 - The Valkyrie
When it comes a’ knocking at my door
What am I to do, what am I to do, oh Lord?
When the cold wind rolls in from the north
What am I to do, what am I to do, oh Lord?
- The Oh Hellos, “Passerine”
The first herald of the change is a storm.
The islanders had awakened to still, leaden air and a sunrise the color of blood and fire, against a morning sky otherwise so blue and clear that it hadn’t felt altogether real. A sailor’s warning if they’d ever seen one, some of the apprentices had murmured uneasily, and they hadn’t been wrong. Only a few hours later the leading edge could be seen, a dark, ragged wall of clouds bearing inexorably down on them from the far north.
False, Queen of the Hunt, stands with her friends on the crumbling seacliffs between Ren’s octagonal fortress and the mountains that have grown up around Boatem harbor, watching the thunderheads build up and up, massing like an army. Whitecaps toss their heads back and forth from the bay’s surface, which has gone the color of slate streaked with chrome, the spray dampening their clothes and chilling their skin. The air is thick as soup and heavy with electricity--False can feel it vibrating in her nerves, hollowing her bones, crawling over her skin like ants.
“Thar she blows,” cracks Martyn Littlewood--once Ren’s star pupil, now an accomplished enchanter with apprentices of his own--from behind her. He punctuates it with a laugh, but uneasily, and the joke falls like a dead leaf, picked up and whipped away by the burgeoning wind. The runes tattooed into the backs of his hands shimmer, as if in response to the charge in the air, or perhaps to Ren’s own tension; beneath Martyn’s clothes, False knows, are dozens more tattoos just like them, the magic that binds his life force to Ren’s etched permanently into his skin. “The Undying must’ve woken up on the wrong side of the waves today.”
“No,” False murmurs. “Not him. Go back and tell your people to get inside.”
Martyn shakes his head. “Hannah and the others will have that well in hand, they’re smart. And Doc’s there with them. I’m staying with Ren.”
Ren snorts. “Hannah, perhaps, but those two friends of hers couldn’t find their rear ends with a torch and a spyglass. Do as the lady says, Martyn,” Ren orders. “All hands on deck, since we’re on a nautical bent.”
“But-”
“Go,” Ren cuts him off, all his normal joviality gone from his voice. “This ain’t no normal storm, can ye not feel it? Get moving, I’ll be right behind you.”
Martyn goes, casting a troubled glance back at the two of them as he does. False doesn’t see; she has eyes only for the oncoming storm.
“If the bastard thinks he can blow us away after all this time with nothing more than a capful of wind and rain--” Ren begins, once Martyn is little more than a violet-cloaked speck far down the road that leads up to the cliffs.
“It’s not about us,” False says absently, watching the waves crash against the rocks below, high and with steadily increasing violence. “Not this time. His eye’s turned elsewhere. This,” she gestures at the sea and the darkening sky, “all this is just side effects.”
“Pity the fool who’s drawn it, then, if we’re still catchin’ hell here. Side effects of what, do you figure? Another one of his little bedtime stories?” Ren utters the phrase like a curse.
“War,” False answers, and feels the spark inside her ignite, dark and beckoning.
False does not return with Ren.
She remains on the cliffs as the hurricane sweeps over the island, turning day into dusk. She doesn’t budge even as the rain soaks her, as the hail stings her skin and the winds tear at her hair and the lightning strikes again and again, close enough to touch. The storm cannot move her no matter how it tries.
Queen of the Hunt, they call her, but she is more than that: she is herald and harbinger, heroine and harvester. She is the valkyrie, defender of the the lives and ships of those she favors, destroyer of those she doesn’t. She is the bright gold against the dark obsidian.
Her counterpart is dead.
She feels it happen as cluster of bolts strike the rods atop Ren’s nearby tower, the blast of thunder that follows loud enough to leave her temporarily deaf. They had been born in fire together, formed from the same dark fabric, the wrong side of humanity’s drive to create and dominate, differing aspects of destruction. Once, for a brief period at the dawn of their existence, they had complemented each other, but their natures were both too different and too similar. They had clashed, again and again. They had been siblings, then strangers, then the bitterest of enemies. And now they are nothing at all.
She searches for a name to put to her feelings. She does not mourn him, certainly, although pain is a part of it, in a dull and distant sort of way. Anger as well--anger at him, the once-bright flames of her rage banked and smoldering but never burned all the way out, for standing at the side of a monster while he violated their home and the minds of her friends. But she also finds a surprising well of anger for him. She knows that he died alone and betrayed, just as she’d warned him he would centuries ago, the Angel of Death’s sword only the last nail in the coffin for a heart and soul already fatally wounded, his final act an atrocity directed by his betrayer. And so, she supposes, she does mourn: not for him, precisely, but for the person he had almost become, that he could have become had he been allowed--someone like herself, freed from the cold and merciless thing she’d once been by her own un-guessed-at capacity to love, drawn out of her by those who’d made themselves dear to her.
In a rightly-ordered world it would be False’s own duty to collect him and the others fallen on that far-away battlefield, to send them on to the Guardian of the Gates to be judged and presented before the Lady. But she knows as sure as she knows her own name that should she try to step sideways to the place that she should, by all rights, be that she would find her way blocked. She knows what that barrier would look like, has heard her friends describe it countless times in hushed and shaking tones: a shimmering wall of glass, rippling dim blue and poison green, invisible to all except those who knew how to look. Worse, she knows that even should she make it past the barrier that there would be precious few souls to gather up: only those who were no more than faceless extras in the Puppeteer’s newest play, who existed only to pad out his cast. The rest will be gone, secreted away like toys in a child’s bin, to be taken out for later play--or forgotten until they fade and wither away into nothing.
And yet…
That spark still flickers inside her, and the electricity still thrums along her nerves. There is more here than death distant war and the bitter rage of her own thwarted purpose. Something is coming, some change hanging bound by a rope that has been slowly fraying, thread by thread, for far too long.
Will it snap? Or will the rope’s spinner notice the damage, repair it, maintain the status quo?
“False?”
There’s a light touch on her shoulder, gentle warmth blooming outward from the point of contact, warmth that False would know anywhere, anywhen. She sighs, reaching up slowly to cover the hand with her own.
“Come with me,” Stress murmurs gently. They are true opposites, the two of them: war and peace, death and healing. They fit each other’s hollows and empty places like pieces of a puzzle, and their friendship runs as deep as the rift that lies beneath the island.
“It’s time to go inside,” she says. “Come home.”
“I can’t,” False whispers. She and the storm are one--she cannot let the hurricane chase her underground until she sees what it leaves behind in its wake.
“Then I’ll wait right here with you,” Stress says, drawing up to her side, and False is deeply grateful. Her counterpart may be dead, but she is not--and she is far from alone. She is the Queen of the Hunt, the Lady of War, the Valkyrie...and she is loved, and loves in return.
Together, they stand against the storm, and wait to see which way the wind will turn.
02 - The Sacrifice
Let me die, let me drown, lay my bones in the ground
I will still come around when the time for sleep is through
Over hill, over dale, through the valley and vale
Do not weep, do not wail, I am coming home to you
- The Oh Hellos, “Thus Always to Tyrants”
The kingdom burns.
She runs through the city streets, even though she shouldn’t be able to, not with her skin burned away and her muscles shredded and her bones pulverized to powder. And yet the smoke from the fires still chokes her, the air molten glass in lungs that should no longer breathe.
She calls out as she runs, slipping on the cobblestones leading down the hill from the palace, crying the names of those she loves and left behind. She calls and calls, hoping that this time she’ll hear an answer, that maybe this time someone will cry out her name in return-- any of her names. Once upon a time she was Cara of the Western shore, a bright-eyed girl who could bend an oar or raise a sail as deftly as any of the men who worked her father’s docks. She left that name behind when she killed the man who would have killed her, forced to run from home and family as a fugitive. For a time she had so many names she was nearly lost to herself, until she found friends on the road, and a place to belong at road’s end, found people and purpose and love. Some of those friends had jokingly named her Puffy, for her mass of curly hair that always stubbornly refused to be tamed, and she had let the nickname stick, laughing. And eventually, she was simply the Captain, embracing her new home with her entire heart and soul, the place she would die to defend.
And all for nothing, says the voice that pursues her, tormenting her. An ordinary enough voice, but hideous for all of that, light with false good cheer. All those people, gone in a flash of flint and steel, sacrificed to your king and country--it’s too bad the assault at the Blue Valley was nothing more than a feint. A distraction while my real forces overran your gates and put your kingdom to the torch and your people to the sword. Speaking of your king, he’s mad, you know. Him and his general, the one they call the Blade. Loonies, both of them. Not playing with a full deck, as an old tagalong of mine might’ve put it. Did you know that they both hear voices? They were the ones who told him what to do, to “blow the motherfucker to smithereens”, to coin a phrase. Folie a deux: a madness shared by two...or five, in this case, counting you and your clever friend and your little sweetheart. He figured if he couldn’t have his kingdom, nobody could...and you all helped him make sure of it.
Shut up, she growls through gritted teeth. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
She runs on, past the blackened husk of Callahan’s tavern where she’d spent so many nights laughing with her friends and comrades in arms, one bloodied hand reaching out from the doorstep as if to invite her in for a drink. She stops briefly at a pile of smoldering beams that had once overflowed with flowers, and calls her lover’s name, knowing that she won’t answer. It had been too much to hope that they might share their hell, as they’d shared their deaths, that the cruel devil who’d sent them here would grant them at least that much comfort.
She reaches the lanes of homes near the city walls and skids to a full stop, horror and sorrow threatening to reduce her to ash all over again, knowing what she’ll see, what she sees every time: Sam’s house, a gutted, flaming ruin, the clockwork marvels that once ticked within its walls reduced to puddles of melted copper and glass and poisonous red slag. Bodies lie scattered in the yard beneath the burning lemon tree. Three or four of them wear the green cloaks and crossed-sword sigil of the Green Army. The last lies face-down in the dirt, a bloody knife clutched in one burned, stiff hand, the smoldering rags of his shirt a dark purple in the firelight.
Gotta hand it to the kid, the voice says. He put up a hell of a fight. Him and the dog. Shame you all left him behind by himself to hold down the fort, just like his brother. Speaking of his brother, I wonder what he’ll say when he finds out?
You bastard, she whispers, choking on tears and smoke. The tears turn to steam as they flow, burning her face like acid, but she barely feels it. Oh you bloody fucking bastard, where are you? Show yourself, you coward!
Oh, I’m far away, the voice replies. Worlds away. Besides, as much as I’d love to stay and play with you some more, I can’t. I’m expecting company, you see, and they’ll be here any minute. But don’t worry. I’ll be back, sure as death and taxes. Until later, my dear.
And just like that she’s alone again, standing amidst the death of love and hope, amidst the burned and broken kingdom she’d sacrificed herself and so many others for.
After a while it comes, the way it always does: the dizzying stutter and then the blink. She thinks the word “rewind”, and doesn’t know what it means or how she knows it, only that it’s the right word. This hell, this nightmare, is winding back, starting over from the beginning once more. Soon she’ll find herself back in the palace, in the empty barracks, and she will begin the search again, and again, and again, forever and ever, world without end.
But when she opens her eyes, she’s still outside Sam’s burning house.
Her breath--the illusion of it, anyway--catches in her throat.
Something is different. Something has changed. She can no longer hear the crackle of the flames, nor feel their heat. The burning city around her doesn’t look quite so devastatingly real anymore; it looks like an illustration, a clever trompe l’oeil painted on a wall or hidden in the pages of an old book. Above her and beyond the city walls, the night sky ripples strangely, like reflections on a disturbed pond.
It’s not real, she realizes. This isn’t hell at all. This is a set. A stage.
Yes, a new voice says--strangely fuzzy, as if coming through thick layers of cloth, but still audible, still clear. Not the voice of her tormentor, but a woman’s voice--the type of voice she might have lit candles to as a young soldier, once upon a time. You have held fast, Cara, you have kept yourself despite all. You are one of mine.
Another woman’s voice joins the first, this one much clearer, deep and rich and powerful. This false end was never meant for you. My Angel works to free you, and my Knight waits to guide you on. Wait only a moment longer.
Wait for what, she starts to ask, but the question is lost as the sound crashes across her private hell like thunder: the booming sound of a great bell. The sound is strangely discordant, not as if the bell had been rung by human hands, but as if some large object had smashed into it at great speed.
And the world around her shatters like glass.
She drops to her knees, wrapping her arms about her head, waiting for the shards to fall on her and slice her to ribbons. No pain comes.
When she opens her eyes again, she’s standing on a long bridge over a lake of molten rock, surrounded by a craggy cavern of dark red stone. Before her stands a figure in dark armor, the visor of his helmet lifted to reveal a messy lock of ash-brown hair and a stern, tired face.
Don’t worry, the knight says. I’m not him.
Is this hell, then? She asks. Truly, this time?
Do you want it to be? he asks her in return, his head tilting slightly in curiosity.
No, she admits. But I think I may deserve it.
The knight shakes his head. You were flint and steel in another man’s hand.
She glances down at her hands, remembering the strike of the spark, the flare of the torch and the hiss of the fuse. I could have refused.
Then it would have been someone else, the knight explains. The play had already been written, and if his actors had somehow managed to refuse their roles, he’d have simply returned to the casting pen and drawn other names.
That voice...who was he? What was he?
A god who fooled himself into believing the world was his to control, and his alone. The knight smiles, and when he does, some of the stony exhaustion leaves his face. What replaces it is something both lovely and terrifying; she can see flames dancing in the pupils of his eyes. I imagine he’s learning very differently right now--it’s hard to control anything when you’re surrounded by nothing. You needn’t worry about him ever again...nor about this place. For you, this is just the transition point. And I’m a friend.
He holds out his hand to her, his smile softening, the flames in his eyes dying down to embers. Will you take my hand, Cara of the Western shore, Captain Puffy that was? asks Wels, Knight of the Underworld, Guardian of Death’s Gate . There are people waiting for you .
Yes, she says, and takes it, allowing him to lead her across the bridge, to whatever world awaits.
03 - The Forgotten
It took forever and a day for the canyons and coasts to erode away
By the weight of the ocean's cyclical motion they swayed
And though the eons may pass as slow as the sands of an hourglass
Every grain that we've counted claims that even the mountains can change
- The Oh Hellos, “New River”
The box is slick black obsidian, small and squat.
The box is blinding white marble, huge and echoing.
There is no time. The prisoner in the black box has no way of knowing how long he’s been there. Once, he thinks, there had been a clock, but he had torn it from the wall, smashed it in a fit of rage and dared his captor come and do something about it. Of course he hadn’t, and between one blink and the next the clock’s smashed fragments had disappeared without a trace. Or perhaps the prisoner had imagined it all, and there had never been a clock in the first place. He doesn’t know.
There is nothing but time. The prisoner in the white box knows exactly how long he has been there, cannot help but know. The watch once gifted to him by a friendly god still ticks against his chest. The god had claimed that it would never be wrong, nor ever stop, and he had spoken truly--not even death or the questionable reality of this cell (cell , he thinks with a hysterical little giggle, rhymes with hell) can keep it from functioning as perfectly as the day he received it. Sometimes he thinks of smashing it, but he can’t be sure which would be worse: to always know the time, or never to know it. And anyway, he hasn’t the heart.
There are no doors in or out of the box, and only one window: the wall of glass that divides the box neatly in two. They can see each other through the glass, though not their prisons: each sees on the other side a perfect mirror image of their own cell. Every now and then a blue-green shimmer ripples through the glass--it’s at those moments that they look the hardest, because sometimes the shimmer carries with it ghostly images laid over the numbing sameness of their cages: obsidian rings, stark against the white marble, filled with swirling violet magic; chunks of glowing stone in the corner and strange dark metal grates on the black glass floor. They fade as soon as they come, like afterimages, their meaning and purposes inscrutable, but they’re the only things to see.
The two of them spend most of their time there these days, sitting or lying pressed against the glass, as if they could feel one another’s warmth through it. They can’t, nor can they hear one another’s voices. It’s agony, but there’s also a broken comfort in the closeness, only a pane’s thickness between them; in the fact that they can still at least see each other’s faces, though the only light in the black box is the dim shimmer from the glass. Occasionally one or the other gets up, to pace or scream or claw futilely at the walls, but mostly they don’t, anymore. There’s no point.
At first, there was another window, although it never showed anything they wanted to see: only the husks of themselves, first on the ground--one sprawled on his back with his face torn and his throat opened, the other curled up tight against his agony, his dying slower and immeasurably more painful--and then later in their lover’s arms, slowly decomposing as the years passed and the elements took their toll, even as their lover remained untouched. Worse than the window by far, worse even than the cells themselves, had been the voice, one they’d once looked up to as friend and savior, now proven the vilest of betrayers.
The world will forget you, it says to Quackity, in his cage of unbreakable black glass. No one will ever know or remember that the two of you even existed, save him. You came to us for help and I did, never asking for a thing in return, and this is how you repay me? You did this to him. Your memory is a poison and it will kill him in the end. So you watch. You watch, and you think about what you’ve done.
You could have stopped all of this, it says to Karl, in his marble vault . You had so many opportunities to prevent any of this from happening, and you knew them all. You just didn’t care. Everything that happened, and everything that will follow, is your fault. You were guests at our table and you stayed long past your welcome, taking what you wanted from us. You took and you took and now you’ve left him empty, as empty as you would have been had I not so foolishly intervened on your behalf. Perhaps I should let it have you again, hm? Perhaps I will.
Eventually the voice leaves them, years or decades later, and the window on the place of their deaths closes. Nothing remains but themselves and the blank walls around them, pitch black and sterile white.
They find ways to communicate. Quackity speaks slowly and carefully, for the first time in his life, so that Karl can read his lips. Karl taps codes against the glass, repeating them again and again until Quackity can understand him even in the darkness. Sometimes Quackity sings, and while Karl cannot hear him he always knows the song, from the rhythms his partner taps against the dividing wall.
Time grinds on, stretching out like warm taffy until it seems ten, twenty, thirty times its true length. Karl’s pocketwatch anchors him, the soft ticking binding him to time as it truly is in the living world (although it’s becoming harder and harder, Karl thinks, to picture that world--did it ever truly exist?); Quackity’s only anchor is Karl. They talk less, to themselves or to each other. It becomes easier to simply close their eyes and drift, to untether what remains of their minds and float away into fantasy.
Sometimes Quackity imagines Dream is there with him, cowering in the corner of his own black box. He conjures rows and rows of tools and weapons to use, each sharper and crueler than the last. Sometimes he imagines the Blood God there as well, imagines himself burying the head of an axe in the bastard’s gut and watching him writhe on the floor, the way Karl had writhed in the dirt before he died. He imagines their tandem screams. He awakens from these fantasies feeling low and sick, all the worse for the vicious pleasure lying just underneath.
Sometimes Karl imagines himself in a kingdom of fanciful buildings and colored lights, far away from war and chaos and misery. His loves are both there with him, resting with him beneath the flowering cherry tree at the heart of the town. There are friends there as well: George lives there in a house of his own, its red roof speckled with white like a mushroom, surrounded by trees and plants of every shape and species. There’s a laughing architect with a sailor’s gold-tanned skin and eyes the deep green of the sea after a storm, and sometimes the god who’d given him his watch even comes to visit. But little by little the others always fade away and disappear, leaving him alone; the color drains away, the cherry tree droops and shifts, becoming a ghost-white willow with a swing hanging from its branches. He wakes from these fantasies screaming.
A hundred years have passed by Karl’s watch--to Quackity it might as easily have been a thousand, or ten (or perhaps merely thirty minutes)--when the voice returns.
Gods, you’re still here? the Green God marvels. I’d have thought you’d have withered away ages ago.
Quackity opens his eyes. He wants to leap to his feet, to scream curses and epithets and demands for release, but he hasn’t the energy. The best he can do is to turn his head slightly from where it rests against the glass barrier.
Have to admit, I pretty well forgot about you both. It was Sapnap who reminded me. I thought he was never going to snap out of it, but he finally did. He came to me looking to find you an anniversary gift, and how could I refuse him? I told him where to look, and then I remembered where I put you.
Karl, to Quackity’s dull surprise, does leap up at the mention of Sapnap’s name. Gift?? he cries, his voice hoarse and rusty from disuse. What are you talking about, you bastard? What gift?? Let us out, let us see him, please!
Do you really want to see, I wonder? I suppose it’s only fair to let you, seeing as he died getting it for you. I thought about sending his gift on to you, you know, I really did...but I can make better use of it elsewhere.
Karl’s hands fly to his mouth. Quackity feels as though the spiked butt of the halberd is punching through his throat again, drowning him in his own blood.
The fourth wall, solid and blank for so many years now, grows milky again, then transparent. They see the burning battlefield, and watch as the Blood God who’d murdered them looks their lover dead in the eye and says I don’t fucking know you. They see the winged shadow drive the sword through their lover’s back. They see him throw the knife, with their names on his lips. They see the boy fall.
I told you, Dream says, his voice dead and stony. I told you you would kill him.
Karl falls to the floor again, sobbing. Quackity simply closes his eyes, and lets himself drift away.
For the first time, Karl loses all sense of time. Hours pass, days, weeks, and he marks none of them. Quackity taps on the glass, their private code, but he does not respond. He retreats into a gray haze of non-awareness, spiraling further and further toward the point of simply fading into the haze forever, until something finally intrudes: a curious sensation of warmth against his chest, the first truly new thing in a century of stasis.
Hey! a voice calls, from a part of his mind that he hasn’t used in so long that he thought he’d forgotten how, broken and staticky. A voice he knows? He can’t be certain, but he thinks maybe he did, once. Hey, can you hear me? I finally found you, didn’t I tell you I would? Yes! I’m so sorry it took me so long, the son of a bitch hid you good.
He sits up, opening his eyes. His hand goes to the pocketwatch that still hangs around his neck and finds it warm, as though it contained a live coal within. On the other side of the glass, he sees Quackity sitting up as well, his eyes round and confused and wary...but brighter, more alive than they’ve been in untold years.
What, Quackity mouths through the glass.
Karl only shakes his head, afraid to even guess, afraid that he’s imagining it.
You hang on now, you hear me? the voice urges. I know you gotta be tired, but you and your friend hang on. It’s almost over.
A crack splits the glass.
The two of them leap to their feet so quickly and so perfectly synchronized that the effect would have been almost comic, in any other circumstance. The crack grows and grows, fanning out in jagged lightning-bolt spikes. A chunk the size of a bread loaf falls out to break up on the floor.
Without a second’s hesitation Karl thrusts his arm through the gap, unmindful of the cutting edges. He grabs Quackity’s hand and pulls and suddenly he’s there, pressed tight against him and trembling as the barrier between them finally shatters altogether. It’s almost too much, after days and months and years and decades of separation, of seeing and never being able to touch, but he refuses to let go.
They cling to each other, repeating each other’s names over and over again, as their prison falls apart around them.
There’s a strange, twisting moment of freefall, of hanging weightless in space, and then they feel solid ground beneath their feet once more. Karl keeps his eyes closed. He can’t open them, nor let go of Quackity, lest all of it prove another fantasy, and he finds himself back where they began.
Two sets of footsteps approach, one heavy, one light. You’re safe, someone says, a man’s voice, he thinks, though not one he knows. You can open your eyes now.
But Karl only shakes his head. Against his chest he feels Quackity do the same. I can’t, he whispers
Let me take ‘em, huh? another voice urges, happy and sad at once, almost vibrating with suppressed energy. They’ve been trapped a long time, they’re scared to death, and I know ‘em.
It’s not your job, B, the first voice argues. You shouldn’t even be in here. But… There’s a pause, and a tired-sounding sigh, but the reply that comes is kind. I doubt She’ll mind, this once.
Footsteps shift toward them, slow and easy. I’m going to take your hand now. Just like before, remember? A small, callused hand slips into Karl’s, gently pulling it away from Quackity, and there’s a moment of panic. But he remembers, dimly, a time long ago--a time when he was lost and afraid, and this same voice and hand, guiding him on to safety.
Who-- Quackity begins, but a finger touches his lips, hushing him.
Welp, no sense stickin’ around this ugly old cave, don’t tell Wels I said that. A snort at that, half annoyed and half amused. Let’s get a move on, shall we? You don’t have to look, if you don’t want, nothin’ to see here anyway. But there’s gonna be, in a minute, lots to see, and maybe even somebody there you’ll recognize. Step careful, and follow where I lead. No harm will come to either of you, I promise.
They walk, holding hands in a chain like blindfolded children playing a game, and then suddenly there’s light, bright enough to penetrate even their closed eyelids, warm on their faces. The hand leading Karl lets go.
Aha! There we are! Safe and sound, as promised, their guide announces jovially. Now, if I’m not mistaken, I believe these two belong t’you?
Karl? A hesitant, disbelieving voice asks. Quackity??
They open their eyes and he’s there, only a few scant yards away, standing beneath a flowering tree in a wide-open field. For an endless stretch of seconds the three of them stand staring at each other, too shocked to move or speak. Karl gropes for Quackity’s hand again, squeezing it in a deathgrip.
Sapnap’s paralysis breaks first. He takes a shaking step toward them, then another, and then they’re all running, laughing and crying at the same time. They crash together, almost toppling over in a tangle, clutching at one another.
Where...Sapnap where are we? Quackity asks, when they can finally speak. His voice is raw; he’s still struggling to catch hold of the fact that this is real, that they’re real and together and free , to pound it into his head like a nail.
We’re home, Sapnap murmurs, pulling them both close. This is home.
Home, Quackity repeats, wondering.
Home, Karl agrees, and closes his eyes again, letting himself believe.
04 - The Phoenix
Hear on the wind how the pendulum swings
Feel how the winter succumbs to the spring
Over the palisade morning will break
Rise up to meet it, oh sleeper awake
- The Oh Hellos, “Caesar”
The hurricane rages on.
Whether it’s one storm, interrupted by occasional lulls, or a whole series of them is something the apprentices of Boatem and the sea traders stranded by the weather argue endlessly over. Occasionally the clouds will break in places, offering brief glimpses of blue before congealing again. The sun has not shown its face in over three weeks, nor the stars or the moon.
The older sailors sheltering in Scar’s inn boast about having survived tempests far worse, while muttering darkly under their breaths about how queer it is that such a violent squall should last for weeks. The northern seas are stormy by nature, especially at the first and last edges of winter, but there’s little denying that something about this one feels unnatural.
Grian knows it for what it is, and hates it.
He surfs the storm, half-blinded by the rain, updrafts catching beneath the wings of his elytra and tossing him into the air before throwing him back down again. Lightning strikes around him as he flies and falls and flies again, screaming his defiance into the wind, high and wild and not human, not even close. His humanity seems impossibly distant, now--a long-ago dream half-forgotten on waking, lost to the never-blinking eyes that once watched him from the Outer Dark and the fire he stole to blind them, to the Green God’s twisting, warping strings.
He has lived in the shadow of this storm for over three hundred years. He has dreamed, but never truly slept--sleep was stolen from him along with his wings. He is not human. Nor is he the clever firebird he’d been the day the hurricane first made landfall on their shores. He’s something else now, a freak, a creature of the horror and the wild. And he is so, so tired.
So kill me if you can! he shrieks as he dodges between the lightning bolts. I know you can hear me! I won’t do it for you, so you just come on and do it! No more stories, no more nightmares, no more games! Tear these wings from my back just like you did before, throw me down into the sea to drown! I dare you!
Of course there’s no answer, and truthfully he hadn’t expected any. All the same, something is here. Something is building up, a charge that can’t be explained away by the static in the air. Something…
There’s a lighter patch in the lead-black sky above and ahead of him, a weak place where the clouds have momentarily begun to rift apart. Beyond it, Grian knows, the real sky waits, almost close enough to touch.
He strains toward it with everything he is, every last shred that remains of what he once was, but his false wings will not take him higher than the winds will allow. He screams again, frustrated tears mixing with the rain.
Hey, mate, a voice suddenly speaks from within his mind.
It’s so different--almost a mirror image, somehow--from the voice he’s been expecting to hear, that he’d dared to come and torment him once again, that his cry dies in his throat, replaced by a sharp, bewildered intake of breath.
Who--
The thin place in the clouds brightens, widens, then tears open altogether. Behind it, the sun shines, bright as life and hope, and Grian flings an arm up in front of his eyes to keep from being blinded.
It bursts into flames.
He screams again as the fire takes hold of him, within as well as without, as the long-smothered cinder at his core ignites once more. It’s agony and ecstasy all at once (had it been this way before? He doesn’t know, it’s been so long--)
There’s a sudden lurch as one of the straps of his harness burns through, Ren’s aging runework giving way beneath the sun’s fire, and oh, there’s the fear. He is falling again, fire eating through leather and silk and shimmering enchanted metal like so much dry kindling (beeswax wings melting on his back), and the storm-tossed ocean below is rushing up to meet him--
More agony rips through his back, warm wetness trickling briefly down only to evaporate within seconds...and then sudden as it came the pain is gone, and he is no longer falling.
His wings catch hold of the last breath of the dying storm. They glow and shimmer like flame, red and gold and blue, propelling him toward the sun.
Welcome home, the Sun seems to say, and Grian cries a greeting in return.
It feels good, doesn’t it, says the voice who’d first spoken to him in his mind, to be yourself again?
Who are you? Grian asks--but something inside of him knows. They are kin now, in many more ways than one, and like calls to like.
Yes, the voice says. And anyway, I think we might’ve met, once or twice. I wish we could speak in person, but I’m afraid this is going to have to do for now, mate. I’m not going to be anywhere we could meet, not for a while.
The storm tatters apart around Grian as he flies, higher and higher. He laughs, giddy and breathless. If I never touch the ground again, he thinks, I would be utterly content.
We are creatures of the wind and the sky, you and I, says Philza, God of Freedom. We are what he made us...and we are what we chose to be in spite of it. I’m choosing this. And you...well. Somebody’s going to have to hold down the fort while I’m away.
Me? Grian asks, completely bewilderd and somehow understanding completely at the same time.
Just because I’ve got this one in check doesn’t mean others won’t come to to weld the shackles back on the world, and I think you know that better than most. Guard their freedom until I get back, Grian, Watcher-Marked, Sunstealer, Phoenix. And… a pause. Look in on Techno, will you, and on my son. They’re going to need friends like you and yours. I just wish you could have met...he trails off, the sentence unfinished.
I will, Grian replies. I promise.
Speaking of your friends, Philza says, you should go back. They’re waiting for you. Until we meet again someday.
Yes, Grian agrees, smiling. Someday.
He banks, relishing the rush of the wind through his feathers, and flies towards home.
On the western rim of Boatem stands a mountain, oddly shaped (like an armchair, Scar had once joked, and it had stuck, like jokes in Boatem always seemed to do), carved deeply in two by a rushing waterfall. Brightly colored houses cover almost every square foot of the mountainside, favorites of the young acolytes who come to Boatem to learn. The rope-and-plank bridges that once stretched across the cleft have been shredded by the storm, but the houses themselves are surprisingly unscathed, as is the great stone temple at the mountain’s peak. The man who’d imagined the village and the temple is long gone, his vision never realized in life, but pieces of his spirit remain--in the sketches he left behind, and the hearts and hands of the people who’d loved him and set out to bring his dream to life.
It’s atop this mountain that the three of them are gathered, laughing and shouting, when Grian arrives. He flies circles around them, buzzing just above their heads, somersaulting in midair. He can’t stop laughing.
“Stop that!” Scar shouts, half-laughing and half crying himself. “Get down here, you pesky godsdamned bird!”
“No way!” Grian calls back. “I’m never coming down again! You’re going to have to lasso me if you want me anywhere near the ground!”
“Don’t think we won’t!” yells Impulse, grinning.
“Come down, Grian,” Pearl begs. “Five minutes, just so we can hug you. Then you can fly away into the sunset never to be seen again. We’ll be sad forever, so you owe us one hug.”
“Well, fine, since you insist.” Grian folds his wings and drops.
To Scar’s credit, he manages not to fall completely off the temple roof as Grian’s entire weight, twenty-foot wingspan and all, barrels into him at what Scar can only guess is terminal velocity. They go down in an awkward tangle of limbs and feathers, laughing all the while. Grian is almost too warm to hold, bringing back dim memories of scorched hands and a blazing house, but Scar couldn’t care less.
“This is real, isn’t it,” Scar whispers, clinging to his friend, fingertips brushing hesitantly over the place where the scapular feathers emerge from Grian’s scorched and shredded tunic. There are other memories, here (raking his fingernails across Grian’s back, digging through fabric and feather alike, a feral determination clawing through his mind. Grian’s wings are gone. It’s not hard. His fingers touch skin and he closes his eyes. The feathers are downy and soft, and incredibly easy to yank out. He really is sorry), but the heat of Grian’s feathers beneath his hands counters them, pushes them back. “We’re free.”
Strong arms pull the two of them to their feet, gathering them against a broad chest. Pearl’s arms join a second later. And--
“I don’t believe it,” a fifth voice exclaims from just off to the side. “You actually finished it!”
Grian gasps, tearing himself away from his friends’ embrace so abruptly in his haste to turn and see the source of the voice--the impossible voice, the voice they’d all have known a hundred lives and worlds away--that he nearly sends them all tumbling back down the mountain. His eyes are wide and round as saucers and he sees…
“Mumbo…?” Scar whispers, breathless with disbelief.
“It’s just the way I pictured it,” Mumbo says, smiling softly--not Mumbo as they’d last seen him, sick and old and frail, but Mumbo as they’d known him at the dawn of their friendship, the heart of their trio and their world. There’s a faint, strange echo to his voice, and even in the strong late-afternoon light he casts no shadow...but he’s there, he’s there.
Grian flings himself at his friend, wings flaring as he clutches him in a desperate, crushing hug. A keening sob escapes his throat.
“Hey now,” Mumbo murmurs, wrapping his arms around Grian in return. He’s cold in Grian’s arms, cold enough to burn a normal person, but the fire of life that burns inside Grian balances it, thaws it. “Hey now, none of that.”
“I miss you,” Grian sobs. Behind him, he can hear Scar’s shaky footsteps approaching. “I miss you so much, please, I'm sorry please don’t leave again please…”
“I’ve missed you too,” Mumbo replies, ghostly fingers carding gently through feathers. “You don’t know...gods, I’ve missed you all so much. I wish…I wish I could...” he swallows.
“Stay,” Scar pleads, pulling up close. His arms open to hold them, then drop again, unsure of what to do. “Please stay. Just a little while longer.”
Grian extends one wing, wrapping it around Scar and pulling him decisively into the hug, into the tight little knot of love and safety, incomplete for so long, finally whole again.
“For a little while longer,” Mumbo agrees, smiling. “And I’ll be back. As often as She’ll let me. Someone’s got to check up on you all.”
They stay that way, the five of them, with Grian’s wings wrapped around them, until the sun sets, staining the sky and the sea beneath it with its fire.
They are free. They are free. They are free.
05 - The Warden
I have always known you
You have always been there in my mind
But now I understand you
And I will not be part of your designs
I know who I am now
And all that you've made of me
I know who you are now
And I name you my enemy
- The Oh Hellos, “Dear Wormwood”
“Dream.”
No response.
The Void is a curious place, the speaker muses. Its appearance depends on the place one views it from: there are planes, only a hair’s thickness from here, where the Void is merely the matrix in which whole ecosystems float, islands of strange pale stone in an endless purple-black sea. It is the opposite of life, of creation itself, yet it exists within all matter, in the space between atoms and the particles that make up those atoms; in the troughs of the waves that we see as light. But this, here, is the Void in its purest form: the absence of everything. No light, no dark, no up, no down, no time, no space, no direction. Nothing but nothing...and themselves, of course.
The Green God hangs suspended in that nothing, falling and floating at the same time. His opposite number drifts at his side, tethered to him by a glimmering gold cord that stretches between both of their wrists. Both are unconscious.
Look upon my works, ye mighty, the God of the Stars thinks, folding his arms, and despair.
He doesn’t look mighty at all. He looks pathetic, floating here battered and bloodied, like an overgrown child after a play-yard brawl, or at least Scott supposes that’s what he would think if he was feeling charitable. He isn’t feeling charitable.
“Wake up, Dream,” he calls, louder this time.
Dream opens his eyes.
His expression is dull at first, face slack, uncomprehending. Then realization floods in. Scott watches with bitter satisfaction as the Green God flails in the emptiness, tugging sharply at the chain that binds him to Philza, who still does not wake. Nor will he, not for a while, at least--Scott has made sure of it.
“How about that,” he observes. “The puppeteer, strung up in his own web. How terribly uncomfortable that must be for you.”
Dream’s eyes widen in shock as he finally notices his other visitor. To his credit, though, Scott notes grudgingly, it only lasts a minute.
“Well, well, well. Scott Starborne,” he exclaims, the old smile settling over his face like a mask. “If I’d known I’d be allowed visitors I’d have cleaned up first. Drag up a chair, make yourself at home. What brings you here? And what happened to him?” he asks, tugging at the glowing chain again.
“He’s sleeping,” Scott replies neutrally. “He’s rather exhausted, after all you put him through. He deserves to rest for a moment. Stars know, he’s going to need every last bit of energy he can muster. Besides, I wanted to talk to you alone.”
Dream’s eyebrows raise. “Oh…? Little old me? About what, I wonder? Or have you come to gloat?”
“Gloat? No,” Scott pauses a moment before continuing. He doesn’t want to gloat. What he wants is to tear this man apart, limb from limb, atom from atom. He wants to see that sickening smile replaced by naked fear followed swiftly by agony. He wants--
A gentle pulse of warmth gathers at the center of him, spreading outward from his core. Easy, a voice whispers from within. Easy, love.
Dream’s head tilts to one side, curiosity flashing green from bruised and shadowed eyes. “No?” he asks. “Not even a little bit? Are you so determined to play the bigger person? There’s no need, you know. I’m at your mercy, here. And I’ve seen you merciless.” He grins. “It was you who won, that second time, after all.”
“Yes,” Scott answers, holding tight to the light that pulses within him. “I suppose I did. And you’d know from merciless, wouldn’t you?” His eyes bore into Dream’s, though his voice remains pleasant, conversational. “I saw what you did to your friends, you know. The punishment you handed down to them for the unthinkable crime of loving and being loved by something that in your arrogance you thought belonged to you.”
There’s a flicker in Dream’s eyes, and the ever-present smile slips a notch. A tight little smile of his own flashes across Scott’s face, there and gone in a heartbeat. “Did you really think no one was watching you?” he asks. “Or is it that you thought it didn’t matter either way?”
Dream rolls his eyes, making a show of looking bored. Scott nods. “Yes, that’s probably closer to the mark. Tell me, Dream...is that what you had in store for Jimmy? To shut him away him in some black oubliette until he went mad and faded away from isolation and despair? Or maybe you meant to hang onto him in the event of an encore performance.”
Dream smirks, and despite the warmth glowing at the center of him Scott has to dig his fingers into his crossed arms to keep from lunging. Tomorrow, when he looks, there will be dark bruises in the shape of fingerprints blooming beneath the skin of his biceps.
“Didn’t have to,” Dream says. “ You did it for me...and without prompting, either.” He glances over to Philza’s sleeping form, still grinning. “Like I told his boy, all I do is write the outline--you fill in the blanks.”
Scott laughs.
Dream blinks, his smile slipping yet another notch, wary confusion trickling into the space left behind. “What’s so funny?”
“You,” Scott says simply, still laughing. He can’t help it. “Just you. You and your pathetic, self-serving blindness. It’s always been your fatal flaw. You needed that blindness to cover for your fear, to reassure yourself that you were in control, that everything was going according to your plan. Look where it's brought you.”
“What the hell are you talking about,” Dream snaps, frowning.
“Jimmy is always with me,” Scott says, smiling softly. He releases his arms and lets the light gather between his hands, waxing and waning like a heartbeat, too bright to look at directly. “He’s a part of this universe, and a part of me, forever.”
Yes, whispers Jimmy. Forever.
Dream’s eyes go wide and disbelieving, the smile finally fading completely from his face. “That’s impossible.”
“Don’t you get it, Dream?” Scott asks, triumph bursting through him, bright as a supernova. “You’ve failed. You’ve failed at everything you ever set out to accomplish. Oh, certainly you won in the short term, and you kept on winning for a long, long time...but the balance always swings back eventually, doesn’t it, Dream? Philza is whole again, has returned to who and what he truly is...and so has Grian. All of us who you bent and twisted but never broke. Philza’s friend and his son will go on together, free of your voice, and bring peace back to each other and to their people. Your friend’s loves outlasted you, despite your best efforts. They have each other now, for eternity, just as I have Jimmy. You, though...you’re alone.”
He shakes his head. “Your two friends loved you, did you know that? They would have done almost anything for you. You stalked them, manipulated them, made yourself the center of their world...you wanted love so badly, but you couldn’t see them as anything but possessions. You broke your own toys before you’d share them with anyone else. And when they think of you now, if they think of you, it will be only with pain and betrayal and loathing. All you have left is yourself...and the man whose nature you stole, whose friends and family you tortured and whose child you murdered. A man whose very being is anathema to you, and you to him. I’d pity you, if you hadn’t brought it on yourself.”
Dream clenches his fists, openmouthed and shaking with rage. Then, as if a switch has been flipped, he’s calm again, the mask back in place. “You know he won’t be able to hold me forever, Scott,” he says, foxfire flickering behind the pupils of his eyes.
“No,” Scott agrees. “Eventually, years or decades or centuries from now, the call of freedom and family will grow too strong for him to resist, even to keep you safely neutralized, and he’ll return where he belongs. Sooner rather than later, if I were him, but he’s got his own issues to work through, and I wouldn’t presume to interfere.”
Dream smirks. Scott answers it with one of his own.
“But you see, Dream...” he continues, his voice growing louder, reverberating through the nothingness that by all rights should swallow it whole, “you’re not in Philza’s domain, nor even Lady Death’s. You’re in my house now." Dream recoils as darkness swirls into the starfire glow of Scott’s eyes, a tarry, depthless blackness that flows over his face and cloak and hands like oil. “You’ve forgotten, Dream, that he who rules the stars also rules the Void between them." The crown of light that revolves around his head flashes to a bloody red; the pulsing ball of light floating in front of him dims, shifts, retreats back into himself, leaving only a coin-sized gem of deep red light just below his throat.
It looks almost like a heart.
Then, as quick as the metamorphosis began, it reverses. Scott is only Scott again, Starborne, Skywriter, god and king and friend and lover. He looks at Dream, at this pathetic, cowering thing who’d once claimed control over reality itself, and smiles.
“So get comfortable, Dream. Drag up a chair, make yourself at home...because you won't be leaving here again.”
Coda - Spin the Wheel
I got a terror I can't shake pushing down on my lungs
It's got me lying there awake with a hand on a gun while turning shadows into shapes
Mother Fortuna, O, she makes sisters of us all
When the faces in her wake
Look more like our own than the effigies we immolate
Over and over, again
We keep that old wheel turning
Over and over, again
We lay the next spoke down
Over and over, again
Over and over, again
We spin it around
- The Oh Hellos, “Torches”
Some truths are immutable.
Even in a universe of infinite worlds, where reality shifts and splits and doubles back on itself, where perception of a thing can irrevocably alter its nature, where time and lives can be placed and broken over and over like building blocks in a bored child’s hands, some things remain constant.
Here, then, the first: That a door, at its most basic, is nothing more than a hole that can take any number of shapes.
Another: That anything can walk through a door, if it’s left open and unguarded.
Two gods flew through a door into the dark together that day, and the door slammed shut behind them. It is a curious irony that the slamming of this door should have broken the locks on so many others, freeing those imprisoned within. Or perhaps not. After all, one of those immutable truths (the second of the Great Laws, as an old god by the name of Etho would’ve called it) states plainly that there is no such thing as free , be it mass or motion or energy or life: that in order for something to happen, something else must be traded away. Equilibrium will inevitably be reached, by whatever means.
The problem with the universe, though, is that it is full of doors. And it doesn’t discriminate. If some of the doors once held shut in the name of Control are to open, all must open.
(As another old god might’ve put it, friend to the first--Keeper of the Scales of Balance, ‘Doc’ to his companions--a scale overburdened too long to one side risks flinging itself from the table, if the counterweight is applied too suddenly or violently.)
Finally, then, a last immutable truth: that nature, left to its own devices, abhors a vacuum.
In the empty darkness beyond the stars, eyes that have been blindfolded for centuries resume their observations, seeking out the ones they’ve marked as theirs.
In the space between seconds, something older than time itself opens one marble-white eye.
And at the bottom of a shattered chasm where irises and morning glories once bloomed, where nothing remains but bones and boulders and cold bedrock, something stirs.