Until the stellar war had ignited. Then planets exploded and were remade seconds later. People were slaughtered, revived, reborn, repaired. Time twisted, slowed, sped up. Space was compressed, then stretched. Bloody lightning fell from the sky, followed by healing rain. Towers sprang from dreams while ruins bloomed into bustling cities that had suddenly always existed.
And Suriel knew that all this was only possible because of the presence of all the Court of Seven. Fathom was the lynchpin of Sector Eleven, with by far the greatest population and the most stable connection to the Way. The world was so stable that it helped steady all the other Iterations in the Sector, so it had to fall before any of the others could. The Mad King had spent great effort trying to destroy it, even with the Scythe of Ozriel.
Yet, without the seven Judges anchoring its existence, he would have succeeded. That the beings of Fathom remained to experience the battle was itself a stroke of fortune.
While Suriel reached all over the Iteration to correct disruptions and knit the fabric of reality back together, her Presence continually spat communications and warnings into her mind.
[WARNING: incoming attack.]
[Telariel has redirected attack; requests restoration at the following coordinates.]
[Sector Three Control reports an unusual spike in deviations.]
[Temporal deviation detected. Corrected by Durandiel, but requires Phoenix support.]
[Sector Zero Control requests an update.]
It was the Spider and his Presence that handled communication through the Way, so Suriel knew he was enduring a far greater deluge of requests and alarms, but she found herself overwhelmed anyway.
There was a reason the Judges never acted together. There were only seven of them.
While their greatest enemies may have chosen to stand and face them here, this was by no means an exhaustive list of the forces arrayed against them. While they were here, they would lose territory everywhere else. Even Sanctum was no longer completely secure, though it had powerful and ancient protections ready to deploy.
They would certainly win here, but they had to make it worth the price.
Suriel’s Presence blared with another alarm, and Suriel knew that this time, the Spider had passed this message to all of them at once.
[WARNING: Haven breached.]
It came with a vision of Haven, the prison-world that looked like an iron prison even from orbit. It flared red in her vision, indicating a spatial breach in the Iteration.
Suriel overheard as the Hound’s voice was transmitted to the Fox.
“Zakariel, go.”
The transmission was more than mere words; she understood that Makiel had scanned the future and found this course of action acceptable. The Fox was the only one who could breach the cordon around Fathom and return to Haven without being caught, and the one who would catch the prey quickly without letting them escape.
Her absence in this Iteration meant that some enemies would be able to flee, and increase the pressure on surrounding worlds, but this was less damage than a full breach of Haven would cause.
But Suriel glimpsed what they would trade for such an action, and her heart went cold.
“Makiel!” she shouted.
The Fox had already slipped out of Fathom and back into the Way, bounding for the prison-world. Only a few prisoners had escaped, those in the least secure layers.
Makiel never turned to Suriel. He continued watching the future.
“It was necessary,” he said, as possibility played out before Suriel’s eyes.
The Mad King clashed swords with Razael, and the stars quaked. At the same time, he struck with the Scythe at Gadrael, who took the blow on his shield.
A stalemate. Until the Fox left.
As though waiting for this very moment, the Mad King tore open a hole to the Void.
That was still extraordinarily difficult; the Way was powerful here, making it all but impossible to reach out to chaos. But Daruman had been capable of such feats even long ago, much less with Ozriel’s Scythe in his hands.
Suriel reached out to heal the fabric of space, and the void portal grew smaller. The Mad King struggled against her, as the portal swirled and flashed, fighting for stability. The longer she held him here, the more time she would give Razael to recover and strike another blow; the Wolf was already gathering power in her flaming sword.
But as Suriel took her focus away from the rest of the Iteration, a crack in Razael’s armor grew wider, a wound in Durandiel’s side festered, and a planet far away cracked and drifted into oblivion.
The moment of her decision seemed to stretch out before Suriel. She could keep Daruman here, or she could keep everyone alive.
Though it wrenched her heart, she stopped struggling against the Mad King.
Razael’s armor flowed back together, Durandiel’s injury reversed until she had never been wounded at all, and the broken planet drifted back together.
The Mad King met Suriel’s eyes as he drifted backwards into the Void, and though millions of kilometers separated them, she could hear the laughter of Oth’kimeth, the Fiend, echoing in her soul.
As the portal winked shut, his blazing red eye never left hers.
[Without first removing Fathom, he will struggle to completely destroy any other worlds in this Sector,] Suriel’s Presence reported, as though that would soothe her. [His removal from the battlefield will ensure our victory, and it is possible that we will win and escape long enough to preserve fragments of any destroyed world.]
Fragments. The pieces of a world that drifted through the Void after an Iteration had been destroyed.
Unless it had been completely culled by the Reaper’s Scythe. In which case no fragments remained at all.
What are the odds that he will change his target?
Her Presence was silent, and Suriel knew why. The Mad King’s target wouldn’t change. There were more strategically valuable worlds in range, like Asylum. With the state of the cosmos as it was, he could strike even at Suriel’s homeworld in Sector Twenty-three.
But he wouldn’t. He wanted a victory that was as symbolic as it was strategic, to conquer the Abidan of the past as well as the present. He would send a message by destroying the home of Ozriel, the birthplace of the Abidan, and the place that produced more Abidan-qualified ascendants than any other.
He was going to destroy Cradle, and Suriel was too late to stop him.
Lindon walked onto a chamber that shone with gray-white light that pulsed like a heart. It was another one of those massive rooms filled with flesh, where the truly enormous dreadbeasts had fused into one mass.
Faded off-white meat filled the entire chamber, spilling over the floor and spiraling up pillars. So far, so expected. But there were no other dreadbeasts here, no children or guardians.
The entire room was focused on one figure in the center. One skeletal, desiccated, six-armed man.
He sat half-melted into a growth that resembled a throne, and he leaned on the armrest with one elbow. His skin was dry and papery, and he had no muscle at all. All six of his hands were intact, but some were a slightly different shade than the others, leading Lindon to wonder if one of those was the hand he now held in a script-sealed container.
The man was dead.
Glassy eyes met Lindon’s. Largely black, with white irises, they had no life within them. And Lindon could feel the power radiating off the figure slowly dissipating, like the last wisps of smoke from a dead fire.
In the center of his chest, where the heart should be, was only a gaping hole.