Mercy beamed. “You found them already! Thank you so much!”
She rushed over and scooped up Little Blue and Orthos, carrying them into a hug that felt for Orthos like being lifted into the top of a tree. Only softer.
Kahn Mala looked over them all. “We know Lindon Arelius and Yerin Arelius are with you down there. What about Eithan Arelius?”
“Nope!” Mercy said cheerily. “I was just here with my friends Orthos and Little Blue!”
Orthos wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Mercy’s joyful demeanor irritate someone so visibly. “You should know better than this, Akura. If we were hostile to you, we would be using techniques rather than words. Since we are allied for the moment, you will show me the respect I am due and tell me the truth.”
Mercy’s eyes shimmered slightly, as they did before she called her armor. “You’re not calling me a liar, are you?”
Her tone wasn’t much different than usual, but Orthos shifted uncomfortably in her arms. She was weak after her time in the labyrinth, and he could feel that she was weak, but his spirit still itched like he was in danger.
The Archlady was less impressed. “You can’t use your mother to threaten me here.”
“I can’t? So you wouldn’t mind if I called her right now, then?”
“…sit by the others.” Kahn Mala put a trembling hand over her eyes. Her cobra hissed again, and Orthos got the strong impression that the Archlady wasn’t used to dealing with anyone without threatening them.
While the next wait was boring, at least it was less so with Mercy there. She chatted easily with them, and even struck up a brief conversation with their Overlord guards. All the while, she kept patting his head or stroking his shell.
That struck him as undignified. If he was his normal size, no one would think of him as a pet.
After time crawled on for too long, the Nethergate swung open again.
Yerin emerged, and she wasn’t alone. Eithan walked at her side. Yerin’s red eyes widened as she saw Redmoon Hall, and she put a hand on her sword.
Orthos began to laugh.
21
Iteration 119: Fathom
Spread out among the stars of Fathom, the seven Judges of the Abidan Court did battle with the Mad King and his armies.
Zakariel, the Fox, slid in and out of existence, dodging lightning-strikes that detonated stars and slipping past armies of half-real Fiends that clawed for her soul. Her dagger flashed, and ten thousand kilometers away, an ancient warrior wearing a silver crown grabbed at his chest.
Despite all the protections he could weave, despite oaths and promises and seals older than many worlds, his heart had been pierced by a hidden dagger.
The Silverlord died without knowing what had killed him.
Telariel, the Spider, spun invisible webs throughout the universe. Ten thousand lesser Vroshir sacrificed ten thousand Class Four Fiends to begin a working that would strike a deadly blow. They were confident in their stealth, hidden by shadows they had dredged from the end of time.
He saw right through them, and with a swipe of his cane, he disrupted their ritual. They slew ten thousand of their own kind for nothing.
A fleet of warships was conjured into reality from the stuff of dreams, targeting the population of a distant planet to weaken the world’s connection to the Way. Telariel misaligned all their engines at once, and the second they ignited their Void Drives, they all exploded into miniature suns.
The Angler used the chaos of battle to slip into a local stellar landmark known as the Heartbeat Star to steal a horn from the dragon that slept at its core, but Telariel tugged her away with a thread of order to let her know that he was watching. Sulking, she retreated.
None of this took The Spider’s full attention. He solved a thousand problems at once, in an instant, without moving a step.
Durandiel, the Ghost, faded in and out of visibility. She strode through a twisted reality that a Class Two Fiend tried to manifest, a warped world of distorted gravity and fleshy trees.
“No,” the Ghost said, and the half-formed reality collapsed.
One Silverlord controlled diamond chains with each link the size of a star, forged from the energy of a foreign world and refined in Fathom’s own system. The chain crashed like a train through a series of inhabited planets, only to slam to a halt on the end of Durandiel’s hand.
“Wrong,” the Ghost said. The diamond chain popped like a bubble, leaving the debris of the planets it had destroyed to drift through space.
A four-armed woman gathered up the collateral damage from one of the Mad King’s attacks, spooling up spatial cracks like thread, and wove them into text that touched something deep inside the world of Fathom.
Time froze around her. In that space beyond time, she began a subtle but far-reaching working, redefining the mechanisms of Iteration One-one-nine.
Durandiel rose up from behind the four-armed Vroshir and watched.
“Not bad,” the Ghost said.
The woman spun around, her backhand trailing energy that could annihilate entire populations, but it was all a function of will and energy, so it faded to nothing before the authority of the Ghost.
The slap landed normally on Durandiel’s cheek.
“Ow.”
The Vroshir flinched and tried to run, but space was still sealed. The Ghost grabbed her by the collar. “Why don’t you come work for me?” She folded the four-armed woman like a piece of paper, but this paper squirmed and resisted, so Durandiel let it unfold slightly and peeked inside.
“It’s that or execution,” she pointed out.
The woman stopped resisting, and the Ghost folded her up and slipped her inside a pocket. The zone of frozen time vanished as she strode after other rule-breakers.
Several galaxies away, the Mad King clashed in combat against Razael, the Wolf, and Gadrael, the Titan. The unstoppable sword of the Abidan and their unbreakable shield.
Every clash between them devastated star systems, setting even distant planets trembling. Civilizations throughout Fathom begged for someone to save them from what was surely the end of the world.
Suriel, the Phoenix, answered them. Her Razor removed toxic energy, hostile will, and insidious parasites even as she herself constantly renewed the Iteration, keeping it moving toward a state of wholeness and order. Corpses returned to life, shattered planets re-formed and drifted back into orbit, and the explosion of stars reversed.
Over it all, the Hound watched, directing each Judge from one decision to another, guiding Fate toward victory. Futures flashed, were chosen, and sprang into being at his command. In realms unseen, he steered causality around dead ends of nonexistence and pitfalls of chaos.
All passed in one blink of a mortal eye.
To the uncountable trillions of mortals who called Fathom home, this was an incomprehensible nightmare. Only earlier that day, across many thousands of inhabited planets, the universe had functioned exactly as it always had.
Then reality had begun to tear apart. A figure with burning eyes, in armor of bone, had appeared in the sky, somehow visible from every city on every planet at once.
He had unraveled their world. They had seen space crumble, time spiral in on itself. Unnamed horrors had sprung forth from nothing, and neither gravity nor reality were reliable any longer. Then the quakes in existence had ceased without warning, and all had been restored to normal. The warped rules had righted themselves, leaving everyone in Fathom to wonder if they had suffered a collective hallucination.