I had nearly had enough of crowds in this peculiar city, but back into one we plunged. What began with a few sleepy citizens shaking off the revelry of the previous night had grown, thickened into a soup of expectant and hungry celebrants. The spaces nearer to the tower filled up gradually, and once the sun was beating down on us all, the plazas and bridges encircling the tower were packed tighter than Helmgarth’s rucksack.

Among the concrete and stone courts encircling the base of the tower, volunteers spilled out through the archways. They had set out dozens of tables and were piling them high with food of every kind and every digital origin. Two-dimensional turkey legs and fruit pies, mouth watering but mispronounced sandviches, turkey dinners with angular contours, spreads of every kind of vegetable, baskets full of patterned mushrooms (red with white dots and green with yellow dots, which my nose told me to steer well clear of), coolers of sea salt ice creams, cheese wheels and sweet rolls, chocolate cakes that filled me with inexplicable suspicion. The smells enticed me, and I was struck with visions of snatching a hunk of chicken or beef and fleeing to a defensible corner before the sentients might stop me. Discipline prevailed and I stayed by my human’s side.

Half the city must have stayed up half the night to bake and prepare this feast, which I felt added another dimension to the Fate’s Eve festivities.

From across the empty redirected circle of river, we shouldered our way past gathering Ludopolitans. “Keep up, lads,” said Helmgarth with a jocular tap of his cane against Commander Zideo’s shoulder. “I’ve a spectacular vantage point to catch the address.” I noticed with some reluctance that he was not positioning us within easy reach of the food. The trouble was going to be getting anywhere through this crowd where it was the thickest, an uncountable swarm of hungry people and animals and hybrids between the two.

We ascended an outdoor stair of wood, squeezing past late risers fresh from their beds, hurrying outside. Helmgarth’s route was quite against the flow of traffic, and my paw was stepped on by a small purple dragon. I snapped, a warning and not a true invitation to combat. The drake continued on his way, but the firefly tagging along behind him gave me a rude gesture before buzzing off.

Not many people must have thought of this position—I suspected they too were more interested in the food than the speech—and only one citizen was there on the roof with us. He was human, powerfully built, and wore scuffed and torn business casual wear: a navy blazer with a frayed hem, slacks torn at one knee, and a splotch of red on his flipped-up collar. He held a device up to his face through which he stared intently with one eye, and which made a very distinct click sound every second or two—often several times in a row, a burst of clicks. He spared a glance for us, and did not interrupt his task of clicking his device at the people gathering, the food, and especially the tower.

We took our position at the lip of the roof. “Nobody’s eating yet?” whispered Zideo.

“Not yet, my good man,” said Helmgarth in a tone that implied it was a good question. “As I mentioned, the address from her majesty comes first, then all are welcome to feast.” Zideo could not stop rudely staring at the other man on the roof, whom we had taken up position a few feet away from.

“Yeah, well,” said Zideo. “I’m ready to eat, bruh.” I found I heartily agreed. “I’m still reeling at how much y’all celebrate in this place. You’ve got a mile of refugees waiting to get in, and everyone’s playing tricks and eating feasts.”

I noticed that the clicks had ceased.

“You’ve arrived at a strange time,” said Helmgarth, his voice low so that he could keep the conversation between the two of them, but still with that new tone of easy excitement.

“Registering new citizens never ceases. But you can’t change what’s on the calendar, now, can you?”

The other man was watching them, and his eyes were gray-green. “Ya know,” he said. “I’ve covered wars, but never anything quite like this.”

Zideo pointed at him. “You’re Eastman Inafune, aren’t you? From Returned Corpses (20_6)?”

The man turned to shrug. “Guilty as charged.” I saw a tin baseball bat with some kind of mechanical modification duct taped to the end hanging from a loop at his hip like a sword when he tilted his body.

“Nice camera,” said Zideo. “Real old-school.”

Eastman smiled. “Mind if I take your picture?”

“Sure,” said Zideo. “For what?”

“The paper,” he said, raising the device to his eye and pointing it at us. Click.

“There’s a paper?” said Helmgarth, then asked himself how he knew what that was.

“No,” said Eastman. “But old habits die hard. I used to cover wars.”

“So you mentioned,” said Helmgarth.

“Great turnout today,” said Eastman, smiling.

The crowd waited expectantly in the shadow of the tower. It had coalesced at the base of the tower, across the mini-moat, enveloping every house and apartment building and place of business as far as I could see in all directions, such that the older edifices of stone and newer ones of wood and plaster rose like islands in a sea of sentients. I smelled restlessness and heard nervous jokes, insults, and bleeps.

“How are a few tables going to feed this many people?” asked Zideo.

A murmur turned into a cheer from the front of the crowd, the inner circle facing southward. Above us, such that I had to bend my neck uncomfortably and endure the hard light of morning in the corner of my eye, there was movement in the tower. A buttressed walkway encircled the top floor of the tower, and a figure appeared there. I could make out a dark arch behind it, and I surmised this must be the balcony the Princess came in from previously when we met her in her library. Spiky hair and jovial proportions indicated that this was not the Princess but the smirking youth that had ushered us into her presence, although I could not see their enormous shoes behind the parapets.

The youth waved and the crowed waved and hooted and shouted back to them. Gulls passed between us and the tower balcony. Sunlight made the stained-glass circle glow, and I noticed the colorful art of the Princess faced the other direction from this side.

“Hey,” said Zideo, turning back to Helmgarth to speak privately, although his volume was loud enough to carry over the crowd’s din. “Are we going to tell someone about what happened last night?”

“Who would we tell, old chum?” returned Helmgarth.

“I don’t know… the cops? Those guardsmen? The Princess?”

Helmgarth indicated the crowd around the tower. “Spot of bother trying to get through, I’d say.”

“This is important. Heck… someone tried to kill us!”

Helmgarth produced a pipe, simple but elegant, and plugged it between his teeth. “I’d say they succeeded,” he said around his teeth. “In one of our cases.”

“You’re not worried about this?” asked Zideo. “You don’t want to know who it was?” I scanned the crowd for white cloaks, looked at the nearby rooftops to see if I could catch a glimpse of fluttering cape.

It was extraordinary how big the sky was here. I’m not sure how else to put it, and you will have to forgive a non-native speaker’s difficulty forming the most eloquent words. Thick clouds were rolling in from the west, not dark, not part of a system, just a few low clouds rolling low across the sky. The sun felt closer here, and set a corona of color about each of the swirling masses of rock on the horizon. The Shards danced their slow paces in every direction. It was a striking scene for a Princess to address her people.

Helmgarth turned to give him a complicated, human look I did not understand. He put his arm on Zideo’s shoulder, and began to say something when a roar from the crowd swept over us and purged all other sound.

The spiky-haired attendant had stepped away, and in their place was the Princess. Her white hair blew beneath her pointy hat, and her gown rippled in the high altitude wind. She half-raised her hands in greeting, and the cheer of the crowd shook the ground and vibrated through the building on which we stood, shaking my feet and my heart. Her mirror sunglasses glowed, reflecting the sun.

Eastman click-click-clicked at her, and turned to us. “That’s my queue. Good day, gentlemen,” he said, and disappeared back down to the lower floors.

The Princess held her hands a little higher, and waited for silence. It was a long time coming, and required many to shush one another, but it came.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

It was palpable, electric, a brittle calm requiring a tremendous discipline from thousands of hungry, excited, offended, hung over and confused beings.

She clasped her white gloved hands behind her back. “My friends,” she said. Her voice carried like dinner bell, more sonorant than dog food chiming into a food bowl. (I was very hungry.) “We celebrate the Fête of Fate today under a shadow.” A drunken hedgehog shouted “Hell yeah” and began laughing; I never found out why, but he was hushed by nearby citizens.

I wondered if the cloud coming this way would bring rain. Typically, I can sense oncoming inclement weather. I recalled the blocky wolf waiting to get into the city from the morning before.

“Your worlds are broken, yet here you stand, side by side with others you never knew existed. Our world, too, is shattered. Yet here we stand in the shadow of the last tower, together.”

She pointed to us and opened her mouth to speak, but froze. Thunder emitted from the cloud that I had not thought was a raincloud. A vibration filled the ground, a tremor singing a deep bass in my stomach. The cloud, I noticed, was heading straight for the tower, gathering above it.

The Princess said no more. She watched the sky, and I smelled the sudden and collective worry of a crowd, the mass moment of shared fear as the same thought echoes through every mind: the animal decision whether to run.

The sky grew half-dark, vast swaths of shadow blanketing the city as when it rains in daylight. It began to occur to a few thousand sentients simultaneously that this was not planned and they might be in some kind of danger.

The clouds roiled and spat forth a tower in the sky the color of shadow and lit by red archer slits. It was suspended on a chunk of rock a third its size, a triangle pointing downward. It soared downward and loomed above the crowd, bringing darkness and thunder and causing panic. The blanket of the masses twisted on itself. People began to run, to push, to trample, to stumble and climb.

“No,” said Helmgarth, frozen to the spot. “No!”

A laughter filled the air—that of one man, carrying loud and clear over the quaking ground and the thundering air. Hysterical and charged, gasping for breath. On the rim of the rocky triangle, tapering to a menacing point above us, stood a figure in a purple cape. He was trying to speak, but he was hunched over laughing and could not master himself.

“What the huh?” asked Zideo. “Are you seeing this?”

“You—ha! Ah haha! You took him—ha ha ha ha!” I could not tell what artifice amplified the voice of the lunatic at the base of the tower in the sky.

But it recalled to me the “Carry Okie” machine that Krystal had sent to Zideo one holiday season long ago, called thus (I have to assume) because it did an okay job of carrying the voice. An electronic timbre entered it, and the floating island assaulted the land below with waves of sound, laughter, dissonance.

“Fools!” shouted the purple man, gesticulating wildly with white-gloved hands. He had a mask, but it hung from his neck—it seemed to be a smiling counterpart to the frowning tragedy masks of the Empire’s troopers.

Minute movement gave away the presence of other figures on the ridge, other persons in the tower. The gaunt windows betrayed a small crowd within the tower—tiny heads pressed against one another to see out, no two the same. The effect was monstrous, a vast, multi-eyed creature of myth, looking in half a hundred directions at once. Beside the unmasked man were machines, ugly chimeras themselves, with exposed gears and belts whirring. One device, larger even than Commander Zideo’s Honda Micro-Commuter EV, and covered in conical shapes that quaked at every syllable spoken by the strange jester.

And standing beside it was someone I was startled, even amid all of the commotion, to recognize: the broad-shouldered woman with the water eyes and dun-white sockets. Her long, tattered coat blew behind her, and she looked down upon the tower of Ludopolis with the same empty emotion I had seen in her eyes through the observation window in Fort Weepus, calm but with an intense curiosity to see what would happen.

The purple lunatic was able to get words in between his mirth, although he frequently halted. “You thought you would gather,” he spat, and sobbed with laughter. “No… no, it is too much… you thought you would celebrate!” He handed the object he was speaking into to the long-coated woman, who held it patiently while he howled to himself. “No! No,” he said, warding off his own wild impulses.

“Listen. Ah hee hee… ahem.” He took back the speaking device. “Seriously. I must know. Who was it?” He glared at the fleeing masses below. The Princess stared up at him without moving. His gaze passed over them, meeting the eye of some of the citizens below, sweeping across them and awaiting an answer to his question.

Zideo seemed to remember something, and turned back to us. “Helmgarth, I’m getting real beginning-of-game vibes here,” he said.

I still wasn’t used to his new appearance as a monied dandy. He was frozen with fear, as still as if the Compendium had paused him, but for the monocle dangling against his shirt.

He seemed to see Zideo, but said nothing.

My human grabbed him by the lapels. “Are you getting this? There’s a tower, there’s bad guys, there’s a princess.” Helmgarth made no reply.

“Who took him? Who took my son from me?” The question was too loud in the machine, and came out dissonant and painful, lashing the city with his rage. Had I any hands, I would have thrown them over my sensitive ears, as many of the humans and not-quite-humans did then. He ceased laughing and glared again, and the citizenry below stared back. Even the fleeing citizens halted their retreat. His hair was like fire, and I was not sure he was not a vengeful god calling the land to account, standing in judgment.

“Because you did… ha! He was brave, and foolish! Hee hee, the idiot! He came here, to this revolting little… warren! Ha ha ho! This obstinate… ugly little place! They told me he was crushed. Can you believe that? The future Emperor? My heir?!”

Zideo looked at Helmgarth. He looked back at the floating island in the sky. He repeated this a few more times.

“Oh,” my human said. “Huh.”

Helmgarth nodded.

I recalled the purple-clad fop whom I had made eye contact with the moment we landed in this world. I recalled the odd way he sort of turned into a pancake, then vanished, beneath Commander Zideo, and it occurred to me that we were to blame for all this.

“Not that it matters,” said the purple king. “I can always make another one. Ha ha ha! How many of you can boast that?” He held the speaking input away from his face as he slapped his own forehead and was wracked with wheezing laughter. It seemed to me a long break in the address, much longer than any human conversation I had ever heard pauses for laughter. He wiped his eyes. “No, ha hoo hoo hoo! It’s entirely too much. Really good stuff.” He recovered himself at great effort. “Well, you see I have forgotten to bring my invasion force with me. That’s because I have decided to let you come to me. Ha ha! A sun for a son. Get it?” He then danced, twirling his patterned purple cape and holding his laughing mask up in front of his face. He sang a tune to himself. Then, anti-climactically, he stiffened and handed the speaking device to the broad-shouldered woman, saying, “Victoria, you’re up,” and stormed off. He got as far as the tower gate when he remembered something and ran back, seizing her arm to speak into it once more. He pointed out to the crowd below, but only laughed again and then dismissed the Princess and the city and possibly all of creation in a wave. He slapped the device out of Victoria’s hands, causing an unbearable barrage of feedback and static that carved through my ears and into my brain. He appeared to laugh, although I could hear little, as he once again heaved himself back to the tower. The reeling keen of the dissonance continued until the woman called Victoria turned it off with an amplified click that felt like it happened inside my brain.

She moved along the ridge to the bigger device, the one with the gears and belts. A trooper, mask frowning, jumped out of the way. She pulled a lever.

The machine whirred and rumbled. It clapped and groaned. It chugged like a train and coughed black smoke.

“Helmgarth, listen to me,” said Zideo. “They’re going to kidnap her. I’ve seen this a thousand times.” The blood had drained from Helmgarth’s face. His tall hat fell off under Zideo’s violent gestures. “We need to get to the Princess! It’s what happens! It’s how these things always start!” The Princess stood at the parapet, her back to us. She stood tall above us, but minuscule before the dark tower. She stared into the roaring, belching machine as something extended from its top, something circular and clear. I was reminded of the magnifying lens that Zideo kept in his sleeping-office and forgot to take with him when he left to go live at the place called “Plasma House.” He sometimes held it in front of small components of his glowing rectangle, manipulating them with tweezers or small tools. The lens was like a window, but distorted things seen through its frame. I could not for the life of me understand why Zideo preferred to use it at times, for it caused things to bulge unrealistically.

A second one of these arose in front of the first, and another, then several more. They were arranged in a row and pointed toward the sky, as though Victoria needed to get a close look at the firmament itself.

She gestured to a detachment of Sorrow Troopers, who wheeled forward some kind of sparkling prism on a tall rod. She pointed this wand that as they adjusted it into the exact position, then she threw a lever.

The sun in the sky flickered.

A ruler-straight thread of light drew from the sun to the first lens, or perhaps it was the other way around. The ray focused through each of the lenses, becoming more intense as it passed through each. After the final lens, it was a laser-thin line of unbearable golden white light, like a razor nick in the universe revealing the golden and formless truth behind it all. It left a green-purple afterimage when I blinked and looked away, which I had to do immediately. Many below covered their eyes or turned away, screaming.

The prism vibrated at an increasing frequency, and a phantom of the truest red light escaped, rushing toward the horizon—to the Shard known as Platformia. Then, the same in orange-yellow, then green, then blue, then purple, bathing all of Ludopolis in the purest form of that color for only an instant before firing off toward the horizon.

With each jolt, the sun shrank. Lisa has a light switch in her dining room, where I am forbidden from being on the chairs, which enables the light to exist not in the binary of off or on but along a spectrum that permits her and her dinner guests to dine in the exact level of dimness or brightness she desires. It felt to me like someone was sliding this very control downward on the sun in the sky, although that seemed impossible to me.

A deep violet engulfed the world for an instant, then disappeared. Night fell instantly across Ludopolis and across the Screenwilds in the distance.

The red lights of the black tower in the sky were exultant. Cruel voices cheered and hollered. The city below was a cacophony of screaming voices and terrified bloops. They swarmed like an upset anthill around us on the streets below, and I was thankful that we were on a rooftop and not being trampled by the stampeding crowd.

The Princess’s gown was a dim slash of starlight blowing in the night sky. She stared at the invading tower, which rose and returned in the direction it came from, wreathed once more in its cloud.

The Princess watched them go, then stared at the cloud as it receded into the horizon and into space itself. Then she walked back inside, and lamps began to light the windows of the tower.

“They didn’t kidnap the Princess,” said Zideo. “That’s hugely surprising, tbh.”

The city began to tear itself to pieces in the dark.