Chapter 359: To the Empire (3)

For the moment, one thing stood beyond doubt. The Twisted Primarch had emerged into the Mortal Realm, and it had swallowed the Empire’s capital whole. Ketal had confirmed the result with his own eyes; what he could not yet grasp was the method. He lacked the precise sequence, the hinge and lever by which the Primarch had reached across and made the city into itself.

“When did it eat this place?” he murmured, more to fix the thought than to seek an answer.

The Empire was the strongest force on the Mortal Realm, yet it had fallen into a Primarch’s hand without any of its people realizing it. More troubling still, there had been no sign of the Twisted anywhere outside the capital.

Perhaps he had missed some trace, but when he set the ruin of Magna Rain beside the stillness of the Empire, the pattern suggested a being that had only just begun to widen its reach. That slowness was strange. By power alone, the Twisted could have eaten half the Mortal Realm in a week if it felt leisurely; that was the conservative measure, the sort of estimate one offered to calm another’s heart.

“The Tower Master left for the Empire two weeks ago,” Ketal recalled.

No word had come from him since. If Ketal set those facts together, he had to assume the capital had been taken at least two weeks earlier. He touched his jaw and thought in plain lines.

“Then there is a limit on it,” he decided. “Something binds its hand.”

He needed information. He could not fight what he could not name. He needed to know how the Twisted had come here, and what it wanted, before he moved in earnest. He also could not thrash inside the thing that now housed them. A bug that began to scuttle across a forearm was noticed at last, and crushed; it was the stillness that let a small life sit where a large one would not feel it. He arranged the next steps cleanly.

“Everything comes after I meet the Emperor,” he said. “Can I be brought before him?”

“Yes,” Helia answered, startled out of her own grim line of thought. She nodded quickly and gathered herself. “I will go first and request an audience. I will also tell him about you. I believe he will be interested.”

“That is enough,” Ketal said. “I will leave it to you.”

He smiled as if the matter were no more than arranging a decent room for the night.

A few hours later, the summons arrived. The Emperor called for Helia.

She went at once to the hall where the imperial throne stood. The Emperor sat with an easy height, and from the dais he regarded her with a gaze that made the room colder by a degree. Helia inclined her head with measured respect.

“It has been some time,” she said. “It is an honor to meet Your Majesty, sovereign of the great Empire.”

She raised her eyes to his face, and a soft sound escaped her. The Emperor looked the same as he had looked for decades. Not a line had deepened; not a shade had drained. She had never dwelled on that fact in her past visits. After Ketal’s warning, the sameness felt like a sign written in bright paint. If the Primarch had swallowed the Empire, it would never have left the Emperor untouched.

Nothing seems that much out of the ordinary...,

she thought, and she let a thread of holy power unspool within her to sense what the eye could not see.

Nothing confessed itself. She could not find a break or stain in the Emperor, nor in the walls of the inner palace. If Ketal had kept his silence, she would have filed the moment under ordinary and gone on. The Emperor’s voice pulled her out of that line of thinking.

“The same to you,” he said. “Saintess of the Sun God, Helia. Why have you sought an audience?”

She weighed the words and frowned. The answer should not have needed asking.

“You ask why,” she said. “Demons invaded the Mortal Realm. The world almost burned and fell. Even the gods poured out their strength to shelter the land. Why did the Empire refuse to move?”

She would have come to the Empire even if Ketal had not urged it. She would have asked the same thing the Tower Master had asked: why they had not helped when the sky was red and the earth opened.

The Emperor leaned his jaw against the throne’s arm and let a tired line touch his mouth.

“You have come to ask the question he asked,” he said.

He meant the Tower Master, and the answer had not changed.

“Because there was no need,” the Emperor said. “The Empire does not care who wins.”

She drew breath to speak and then closed her lips again. The hall held the words like a metallic taste. He lifted a hand, as if to wave the conversation away.

“That is enough,” he said. “The rest bores me. Is that all?”

His eyes dimmed. Helia did not notice the way the palace itself began to stir, the way the beams took a slower breath, and the stones beneath the silk rugs felt for her feet. If she stood still much longer, the hall would close around her as it had around the Tower Master, and she would be consumed by the city she had come to meet.

However, she spoke again before that could happen.

“It is not all,” she said. “There is someone I wish to present.”

The palace stilled. The Emperor’s brows lifted slightly.

“To present,” he said. “Who?”

“Someone who may amuse Your Majesty,” Helia said. “He is one who has guarded this world.”

“The one who fought the Demon King,” the Emperor said. “I have heard the rumor.”

Interest sharpened the line of his mouth.

The Demon King stood high. Even beside the being the Emperor served, the Demon King did not come off badly. That had been true in the past. Now the Emperor’s master stood stronger than before, and such a fight would likely end differently. Even so, to hear that a creature made largely of earth and breath had defeated what even his master had once found unpleasant was enough to raise curiosity in any host.

If I take him and offer him,

the Emperor thought,

the one I serve will be pleased.

“Very well,” he said, smiling. “Bring him.”

“At once,” Helia said.

She clapped her hands once. That clap carried a signature of holy power and leapt to the place where Ketal waited. The signal was simple and strong.

“I have called him,” she said. “He will arrive shortly.”

“I will wait,” the Emperor said.

An unknown man from outside the Empire would stand before the Emperor. Under other crowns, there would have been layers of checks, countersigns, and questioners. In the Empire, there was only the will of the man on the seat. The city belonged to him; his word wrote its law; if he wished to see a stranger without a preliminary, then that was how the morning would go.

Footsteps came. In the held silence, a soft knock touched the door. The Emperor spoke.

“Enter.”

The hinges sounded, and the door swept inward. The Emperor reached for the palace with his mind and spread it to seize the newcomer before the first sentence could be spoken. The one who had faced the Demon King would be strong; he would not be given time to fix his feet. That plan paused when the Emperor looked up and saw the face.

A barbarian stood on the threshold.

He was large, a man of ash-grey hair cut close, with the build of someone who had never in his life felt weakness in his hands. Something about him felt wrong to the Emperor, wrong in a way that was not exactly hostile and not at all human. The barbarian and the Emperor looked at each other. Ketal smiled as if he had just confirmed a bet he had placed.

“So,” Ketal said. “A host. Waiting was the right choice.”

“You—” the Emperor began.

He did not finish. Ketal moved, the floor cracking under the push of his foot. He crossed the hall with enough speed to break the air in front of him. He caught the Emperor’s head in one hand and turned it as if he were twisting a cap from a jar.

***

Helia screamed, a high, unpracticed note that she had not made in years. She could not help it. She had brought the saintly calm of a hundred negotiations into this hall, and in an instant, the man she had come to address was in Ketal’s hand as if he were a thief caught in a doorway.

“Ketal!” she cried. “What are you doing?”

Ketal did not answer with words. He finished the motion he had begun. Bone gave under his palm. In any ordinary body, the movement would have ended the life nested in the flesh and spilled it onto the floor. However, the Emperor did not die. He threw a hand like a knife to force Ketal back; Ketal took the strike on his elbow and crushed the fingers that had tried to claw him.

“You—” the Emperor said, shocked into anger.

His form blurred as the twist took hold, the motion rippling through him like a distortion in the air. He reached for the power that turned and shattered whatever it touched. Helia watched the edges of the world bend and warp at the corners of her vision, her lips parting in a protest that never found its way into sound.

Ketal did not allow the power to set its teeth. He pressed the Emperor down and reached back for the axe at his hip. Aura rose bright along the edge as he pulled the blade free.

The strike came in a single, decisive motion. The axe descended, cleaving the Emperor cleanly down the middle. His body fell, the two halves lying apart without even the faintest effort to mend, and not the slightest movement followed.

A ruler of the Empire, the master of the strongest house on the Mortal Realm, lay in two pieces on the polished floor. The barbarian who had killed him looked almost refreshed.

“Regicide!” Ketal said with a grin. “I always wondered how it would feel to try at least once.”

“Ketal,” Helia said. “What is—what is this...?”

“You did not notice,” Ketal answered. “That was not a human being. Whatever wore the Emperor’s face had been wearing it for a long time.”

𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

“I saw the wrongness with my own eyes,” Helia said. “I do not doubt that part.”

That was not what had shaken her. She had expected him to try to heal, to pull the rot free and put the Monarch back in his place.

“I thought you meant to cure him,” she said. “I thought that was why you wanted an audience.”

“No,” Ketal said. “I wanted to confirm that he was a host.”

The Twisted Primarch could stain and remake what it touched. Ketal had seen barbarians from the White Snowfield fall into its service more than once. Among the many forms the service took, one kind of servant served as a host. Through them, the Primarch could multiply, spread like a contagion, expand by orders of magnitude. It was hard even for the Twisted to fashion such a host; Ketal had not seen many.

If the Emperor stood as a host, the Primarch would try to shelter him. Only quick hands could remove the piece from the board before the larger player could reach for it.

“If you kill the Twisted One, some stains return to their first color,” Ketal said. “Leaving a host in place is worse than making the attempt and failing.”

Helia could not follow him to that conclusion in one step. Her mind tried to align itself and failed, and in the space of that failure, the hall changed.

“The host has been removed,” Ketal said softly, lifting his head.

The parasite on the body had not merely shifted position—it had bitten down. At such a level of movement, the greater being was bound to take notice, and he could feel that awareness turn sharply toward him.

“It will come.”

Even as he said it, the inner palace began to fail. The walls flexed, and in the soft sound of wood stretching was the begins of a roar. The hidden body tore the local space to appear. The world warped and altered; the definitions of distance and direction forgot themselves. The hall’s long perspective birthed a shape.

It looked like a sea urchin large enough to break a mountain. Tens of thousands of barbed spines writhed and twisted into one organism. Its presence alone buckled the rules of the hall. Where it rested, reality went soft and yielded; where it brushed, concepts bent.

Helia’s knees lost their purchase, and she dropped like someone told to kneel by a word. Her mind tried to leave her body and save itself by distance. Ketal stepped in front of her and lifted the weight of his presence like a shield.

“It has been a while,” he said. “Twisted One. I did not want to see that face again.”

“A being from elsewhere...”

The voice did not scrape the ear or rattle the chest. It worked on the room at the level of idea, and the room yielded as a page yields to a wet thumb. Helia felt the concepts around her go out of true with each word.

“They said you were gone. Of course, you were Outside. This time, we will finish the long fight.”

Power fell over Ketal like a dark fabric pulled off a coffin. He felt the warning and moved as it fell, the axe flashing. Aura met a force that had no color and should not have been visible.

The collision rang and ran. A pressure wave rippled outward. The hall’s angles writhed and began to spoil. The echo reached for everything beyond the walls and tried to crease the world.

Helia stood too close. Even with Ketal protecting her and even with her own grace drawn up into a barrier, she took the strike full on. She coughed and tasted iron. Something inside her twisted.

The ends of her limbs wanted to turn backward from the joints, and the bones in her arms ached as if trying to grow in spiral. She looked down in disbelief. Skin near her wrist showed a faint whirl, a visible torque that had no business being in flesh. She called her holy power to heal and found the light slow and reluctant.

“This—madness,” she said.

Ketal had told her the Twisted One stood on the Demon King’s step. She had not quite believed it. The Demon King was the sort of enemy even gods hesitated to face in earnest. That several such beings existed and took interest in their world had not been something her mind would let itself hold.

However, she believed now. Ketal was not exaggerating; he had not been trying to frighten her into caution. He had simply told her how tall the wall was.

“I am grateful to you,” the Twisted One said. “If not for you, I would have waited a very long time inside that place. Because of you, the seal failed, and I reached my hand out.”

Force shook itself loose and filled the hall. The seams in the world began to open like split bark. What many gods had bound together showed a hairline crack, and joy bloomed in what had been bound.

“This is only the beginning,” it said. “I will dye all things with myself. I will return the universe to its proper form.”

“Fuck that,” Ketal said, and the contempt had a curl of laughter at the edge.

His face in that moment did not look like the face he wore in the capitals and the holy lands. Something in it looked odd and wrong, matching the Twisted One in the way a reflection matched a man when the glass was warped.

That, too, made a plain kind of sense. The one who stood here was not the Ketal of the fantasy’s streets and courts. He was Ketal of the White Snowfield, the chieftain of the ashen-haired barbarians who lived where the light came thin and blue.

He set both hands on the axe and drove it down. The Twisted One called its authority, and the powers met. The wake of their impact shook the space on every side.