Chapter Text
"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy." - Ishirō Honda
~*~
Blood-red, deep;
Heaven knows how it came to pass.
Somebody's pound of flesh rendered up.
Wrinkled with secrets
And hard with the intention to keep them.
- D.H. Lawrence, Peach
King Bowser arrived before the toppled gates of Koopa Castle to find his home burning. Churning pillars of smoke spilled upwards, flooding the sky black. And all those new holes they'd knocked through the curtain walls, well, he wasn't a fan.
Siege gun shot hammered the fortress, shaking its stonework into taluses of gravel. Immense balls of black iron plowed through crenelated battlements, demolished gatehouses, tumbled towers, and blew bastions down. The cannonade flew on strange trajectories, falling from the sky like heavy metal rain.
And the worst of it—the bastards doing this were nowhere to be seen. No target on which to vent his just and super-heated wrath. He'd met no patrols or defensive lines on the way in. The lands surrounding the castle were clear of firing crew nests.
As he strained for a better view of the phantom army dismantling his castle, Bowser caught a glimpse of something huge swimming around on high, hidden behind all the smoke. This called for a closer look.
Front door out of commission, Bowser picked a recently installed gap in the wall and slipped into the bailey. Here the dense smoke sank to the ground, pooling deep enough to reach his knees. He waded into the murk, head on a swivel searching for surviving troopas. No sentry, friend or foe, challenged his entry.
Some of the cannon shot bounced around instead of cratering into the flagstones. Their bounding toy ball dance belied a kinetic fury which could shatter shell and bone with the slightest brush. Bowser had a blast dodging these while the explosions of firing canons filled his brain until thought became impossible.
The bombardment halted abruptly, its ruinous work done—his castle half reduced to powder. Profound silence, almost holy, came down along with the falling ashes. He dared to pry his claws from his ear holes. No, not silence. Shock. And as numbness faded into the ringing of damaged hearing, a droning of many propellers beating the air broke through. He looked again to the boiling ceiling of smog, where a bulk of monstrous proportions split the black cloud banks against its brutal bow of bolted steel and splintering logs. The gray mouths of cannon glinted from double-decked rows of ports now closing their shutters. Bowser saw little else before this dreadnought of the sky tacked into several twisting columns of smoke and vanished, its sinister drone fading beneath the local noises of ruin in progress.
No time to ponder the unsettling implications of what, exactly, was that thing. There were survivors to find and a counterattack to muster.
Bowser weaved a twisting path through the bailey, circumventing hills of crumbled masonry and jumping over spent shot and newly opened fissures. Everywhere lay the slain. At a rough guess, from what could be glimpsed while barreling through the fog of war, the ratio of the dead was ten invaders for every Koopa. Bowser derived little cold comfort from this statistic. The enemy could easily afford thirty to one.
Even so, the small hope would not die that a larger part of the garrison had fallen back to continue the fight indoors, or fled for whatever hiding places remained.
A grisly monument reared from the churning gloom. Before the inner gatehouse the enemy dead heaped high enough to seal off the portal. Here his boys had made one hell of a final stand. He was obliged to clamber up a slope of slaughter and shattered weapons, some bodies still writhing and groaning beneath him, until gore glossed he slid down the lee side. As few as ten of the slain on the other side were Koopas, fallen where they had stood fast against the gruesome tide, and this gave his hope strength. Bowser stepped reverently over the honorable dead and passed through the portcullis whose bars had been exploded inward.
The great hall was a familiar space made alien by the debris of mayhem. Everything reeked of fear. Bringing the motifs of doom and destruction together were the throbbing crimson fires he had not lit himself. Bowser's small hope shrugged, hung up an 'out of business' sign, and shuffled off to find work elsewhere.
In every direction, indoors and out, the havoc wreaked awed him in its scale and intensity. They had planned this assault, took their time, watched and waited until business required he be elsewhere. Bowser had left on a far ranging to inspect the condition of his borderlands patrol companies and to pay diplomatic calls on the courts of neighboring kingdoms. In the middle of a three week absence, the enemy made their move.
What the invaders had not taken into account was Kamek. The magikoopa reached out through a sending while Bowser slept, interrupting a happy dream of dinner with a frantic warning that the enemy parachuted in from the sky en masse. Bowser returned with all possible haste, using every secret warp known to him along the way, and yet he arrived too late.
Down the gray stone halls a scream echoed. A human scream. Only two of that rare breed resided in the castle. A premonition of doom iced over his bowels.
Bowser barreled on, hungry for some brave hero to step into his path. He'd deal the fool a hurtin' which would pass into legend. A strange sucking hiss stopped him dead. He searched for the source of the noise, but the smoke billowing in through every window smothered out the light of the magma pools, making it impossible to see much further than the end of his nose. He inched toward the nearest pit and peered over the edge just in time to watch the last rivulet of luminescent orange trickle down a jagged crack in the basin floor. It was the same for the other pits—drained of lava with only scorched rocks left behind. Bowser howled in grief. Those magma pools were his pride and joy. Self-heating, guaranteed to stay in a molten state for a hundred years or his money back. Nothing made a lair a home like some classy red hot liquid rock, and he had paid dear in gold coins to have those pools installed. Oh, there would be blood for this.
A red-shelled Koopa Troopa hurtled flailing from the gloom and smacked beak first into Bowser's knee. Before his minion could sputter apologies, Bowser gripped the neck rim of his shell and lifted the crazed Koopa to eye-level.
"What's happening? Who's attacking us? How many of them? Where are they?"
The troopa shook his head. Already shivering, he began to quake in earnest. "There was an explosion. A lotta explosions. And then they were everywhere."
"Who?"
"The Toads." The troopa covered his eyes. "Swarming. Stabbing! We... we..."
"Okay, shut up and listen. I need you to gather up some guys. Form into squads and start sweeping this place out. Top to bottom. No one stays alone. Got it?"
The troopa nodded, though Bowser could see the doubt in his quivering eyes. This soldier was fighting the urge to locate the nearest exit and vamoose—a fight he was losing. Bowser set him down and leaned in close. "Listen. The Toads are cowards. They'll pick you off alone when they got the numbers on their side, but they'll turn tail and run if facing down two or more of you. Now get outta here and get your counterattackage on."
The Koopa nodded and wobbled off at top speed, face first into the nearest wall.
"That way!" Bowser shouted, pointing. The troopa gulped and sprinted off down a side passage. Bowser shook his head. At least the jerk was more afraid of his king than anything out there, just as it should be.
Another scream, distant yet piercing. Definitely human. It had come from the central keep. The keep that housed the living quarters. Cold electricity numbed Bowser's face and limbs. He sped up his lumbering gallop into a thundering charge, screaming at any surviving minions he passed, commanding them to organize and fight back.
Not again. Please don't let it be her. Not this time. Stars knew, lasting peace was too much to hope for, but did his hated nemesis really have to come back so damn soon?
He spotted the Toads now, rounded heads and chubby bowling pin bodies skittering through the murk, hunched over the Koopas and Goombas and Shy Guys they had slain, little hands groping and little curved knives flashing as they stripped loot from the bodies of soldiers—prizes that included not just the equipment his minions carried but their very flesh as well. Koopa shells, in particular, were a prized commodity in the red markets of these abominations.
Rage twisted together with revulsion at the sight of these sapient vermin despoiling his home and scavenging the fallen remains of his brave troopas. The sheer affront to his honor on display, the towering disrespect of it all, provoked the inner fires. His chest became a furnace of wrath.
A set of the things, perhaps struggling under their shouldered glut of flesh and pillage, or filled with swagger and pride at their supposed victory, did not scatter as fast as they normally might when Bowser bowled into the clustered pins of their bodies. Bowser hosed them down with rolling boulders of flame breath hot enough to ignite the air. The Toads perished all too quickly, scorched into charcoal effigies of themselves, each frozen as his breath had found them in the motions of alarm and useless flight. Bowser stomped the brittle figurines, crushing them into sticky black crumbs.
The hall empty of targets and the blood thirst still thick on his tongue, the King of Koopas seethed at the bottom of the staircase which led to the dormitory wing of the keep. Up the stairs he roared and down the twisting corridors he raged until he stood before the door of Mario's room. The sprawled body of a friend was there to greet him.
Kamek lay in a pool of jumbled and broken runes. Words of sorcery written in eldritch light drained from his veins in lieu of blood. With a rattling gasp he strained to lift his head. Bowser flashed to Kamek's side, setting the aged head to rest in his lap. No tear in the robe, no visible sign of a weapon's entry wound on the magikoopa, but reckoning the way Kamek shuddered and struggled to breathe, Bowser knew his lifelong retainer had suffered a mortal blow. He cradled the small, matchstick-light body.
"Relax, Teach," said Bowser. "I heard your call and came running."
"Followed my instructions. For the first... time in your life." Kamek clenched his eyelids. "Haste... is paramount. Don't let her escape with the prince. Sorry, I..." The eyes opened once more, and as Kamek beheld his king's face for the last time, the ghost lights within him snuffed out. Scales grayed and wilted, bones and sinew crumpled into dust. Within seconds the remains of Kamek blew away on an ethereal wind into mystic dimensions, nevermore to wander the physical realm.
Bowser knelt alone in a bare corridor, haunted by the distant clamor of war.
He turned a red gaze upon the door to Mario's quarters and rediscovered a sense of urgency. There were still living friends to fight for, after all, and he would remember his vizier's dying instructions. After the bitch, full throttle.
Bowser kicked the door wide open just in time to watch Mario's last living bodyguard die. Goomberto leapt the fallen bodies of his brother guards and threw himself at a woman wearing a pink evening gown, fangs glinting in his yawning jaws. The woman leisurely swung her unfurled parasol at the Goomba. A pair of round, kindly eyes and a smiling half-moon mouth opened in the orange and yellow silk canopy. The parasol swallowed Goomberto whole. As much as he thrashed against the silk, Goomberto couldn't break free, his muffled squealing terrible to hear. Worse were the wet squishing noises as the parasol canopy began undulating. All this had taken three seconds while Bowser stood still in horrified fascination. Beyond the grave, Kamek was probably shaking his head in disappointment. Bowser swore under his breath and lunged, claws swinging.
The dainty woman's voluminous overskirt billowed as she vaulted over Bowser's seeking talons. A steel stiletto high heel jabbed him between the horns as she floated overhead.
Blood curtained down over his field of view. Bowser spun madly, hunting his prey. Mario lay corpse-still on his feather bed. A quick check confirmed the prince, wrapped in his favorite red leisure suit, was still breathing, thank the Stars.
"Hello again, Koopa darling," purred that hateful voice.
Peach, Queen of the Mushroom Empire, reclined atop the dresser and favored him with a smile that did not reflect what lurked in her eyes. The scalp wound still bled into his eyes but Bowser dared not wipe them clear and risk breaking, even for an instant, line of sight with the threat.
"You shell-shanking skank! You should be dead," he growled.
"'Should' is such a weak word, my vanquished." She looked as delicate as ever. He'd sell everything he owned to get that hourglass figure between his jaws, just long enough for one bite… "If only your spirit were as hard as your shell, I might consider courting you. Perhaps an eventual promotion into a minor consortship wouldn't be out of the question. Alas, I fear that airship has set sail—"
Bowser rushed her, claws reaching, maw snapping, saliva streaking. Peach drew the frying pan she'd hid down her skirt and with whipcord quickness hammered him in the cheek, shoving his snout aside. Bowser swallowed empty air and crashed into the dresser, smashing it to match sticks. Peach was already airborne, kicking down as she hovered overhead, stabbing his head once, twice with her spiked heels.
Momentarily blinded by a fresh downpour of scalp blood, Bowser struck and snapped about, hoping for a lucky strike. Though his belly ached to release the inferno roiling inside, Bowser dared not spew his flame breath in such a confined space. That would surely kill Mario, and Peach knew it.
Bowser heard the faint clack of Peach's shoes landing on the stone tiles behind him. He spun, sweeping out with his short tail. The tail of a Koopa is naturally small and stubby. People tend to forget that it's there. The queen did not get both feet off the ground in time. She tripped backwards with a startled grunt. Bowser lashed out with both paws to rake her open. Peach grabbed his forearm and swung herself up and over, giving him both a flash of her undergarments and the glinting steel of her pointy footwear as she kicked for his eyes. Bowser caught the ripostes on the tough scales of his free palm, then snatched her ankles before she could squirm to safety.
The queen hissed with rage, gloved fingers scrambling over her dress for another hidden weapon. Bowser laughed in vicious triumph and spun her around in lateral circles. By happy accident he smacked her head into the opened door. At full speed he let go, aiming her at the nearest wall. "Bye, bye!"
A mistake, for her dress flared out like a parachute, dragging at the air to save its master. Breaking several laws of physics, Peach reversed midair and landed on her feet, sticking to the vertical surface of the wall, crouching like a spider. Bowser had her cornered, blocking the window behind him and the door to his left. "No where left to fly, my dove," he growled.
Blood trickled from her split lip as Peach sneered back. "We dance so beautifully, and I have missed it. Even though you were always a clumsy partner." As she spoke, she slid a golden star from a hidden pocket. Bowser, two steps into a murderous charge, stopped dead. There was no mistaking that five-pointed shape and the strobing golden light it emitted. A Starman. She was desperate to use such a rare treasure. Or perhaps determined to see him dead this day.
Knowing it would mean certain defeat should she embrace the Starman's power, he plunged at her with renewed ferocity. Queen Peach pressed the Starman into her bosom and exploded into a cacophony of lights, shifting through every color that had a name and many that did not.
Transformed and invincible, Peach advanced on him, her every movement trailing delayed reflections, so laden was she with cosmic power. Yet she came on without hurry, savoring his fear, too bright and terrible to gaze on for more than a second.
Bowser watched anyways, though staring into the noon sun on a clear summer's day would've been more comfortable. Never had Peach looked more regal or glorious. A brush of her fingers would suffice to dispatch him to the Levels beyond death. He might lunge for the door, but she would almost certainly strike him before he crossed the threshold. And besides, running meant abandoning Mario. Bowser refused to leave a friend behind. All the same, it was now he who was cornered.
Lost to despair, Bowser inhaled deeply, knowing the heart-fed fire coiled within would do no more good here than his fists. Didn't matter. Any futile act of defiance was better than passively waiting for the grave to walk right on up and swallow him.
Peach smiled, her lips like solar flares. In a voice that made the stones of the keep shiver, she said, "Good bye, vanquished. This world will not miss you. Though I might recall you to mind whenever I need a laugh." Lace gloved fingers shimmering with a thousand colors reached out for his throat.
A sledge hammer pinwheeled through the bedroom doorway and slammed into Peach's shoulder. The weapon disintegrated into glowing white dust. Peach glanced sideways as if someone had politely tapped that shoulder. Luigi followed the hammer, a ragged, wordless bellow tearing from his throat. Wild eyes rolling in his berserker rage-contorted face, he seized her slender arms in his mighty fists.
"Damn you! How?" Peach stammered as Mario's brother forced her backwards, the heavy leather gloves he wore bursting into flame against her skin.
Peach thrashed but could not break free. She stamped her high heels down into Luigi's work boots, punching smoking holes into the blackening leather. Luigi roared and shoved harder, mouth frothing.
"Luigi, stop. She'll kill you for sure!" Bowser shouted, unheard. There was no reaching Luigi in this state.
Many-colored lightning sprouted from Luigi, arcing off his limbs and hair. He let go and slumped to the floor. Peach kicked him away, tsk-tsking with disgust, but already the Starman's light was fading, the colors cycling slower and slower.
Bowser threw himself bodily through the air. From seemingly nowhere, Peach held at the ready a white turnip of Sub-Con. The dread vegetable, native to the land of dreams and nightmares, had grown on one side of its pallid, fleshy root the face of a strangled man, lined and sagging. As Bowser descended upon her, Peach tossed the turnip contemptuously into his snout. The toxic vegetable slapped him in the skull and he knew only darkness.
The blackout did not last long. Bowser awakened to find the queen perched on the ledge outside the open bedroom window, two Toads laboring by her side. These fungal retainers bore the unconscious Mario over their heads as easily as hefting a sack of flour, a tether of rope secure around his waist. In the peace of sorcerous slumber, Mario's soft, clean-shaven face was smooth of all creases.
"No." Bowser's voice came out a horse croak. He commanded his arms to reach and his legs to stand, but they only half obeyed. Queen Peach blew him a kiss, then hovered backwards into the open air of the night sky. The Toads jumped down off the ledge, into what was a sheer five hundred foot drop to the spiked battlements below. The great whirring drone he'd heard in the bailey returned, drawing near and accompanied by the chugging of great engines. Just as suddenly as they'd swelled in pitch, these sounds began to recede.
Bowser crawled to the window and drew himself up with great effort. Peach and her Toads were gone from sight, but the retreating airship was easy enough to spot, its silhouette blotting out the stars as it flew away, a hulk crowned by a thousand whirling propellers.
Its shadow, cut from the light of the moon, flitted over hill and bog, like an omen of doom marking the land for death. His land. But for how much longer? Until that moment, airships had only existed in myth and the overheated conjecture of fringe scientists. He never thought he would see one, much less in operation. Such an invention would change warfare forever, and tip the balance of power still further in Peach's favor. Unless he did something about it.
He tried to catch a glimpse of the Toads bearing the enchanted Mario below decks, a last confirmation his friend remained alive, but the airship had shrank to a mote of darkness vanishing into the hungry blackness between the stars.
Bowser let go and slid to the floor, only to be greeted by another impossible sight. Luigi groaned and dragged his singed self to standing. Just how he could've survived contact with the Starman's power boggled Bowser, but he was nonetheless grateful for the miracle.
Luigi staggered over to where he lay, staring down with those dark, shut eyes.
"Get everyone together," croaked Bowser. "Tonight we convene a council of war."