-[Chapter 010]-

Basil knocked on the door before entering the Emperor’s private quarters. His minions stayed behind in the hallway, bows and blades at the ready. They would stand guard while their master held his audience with the ruler in charge of the civilization that he was currently burning.

As he stepped inside the Emperor’s bedchamber, Basil found an old man sitting at a table in the middle of the room. Said to have been blessed with long life by the Maiden Solar herself, Emperor Osran the Wise had held his beleaguered empire together for over a hundred years. In his youth he had campaigned tirelessly against the encroaching hordes of monsters that hounded the borders of his realm and in his elder years his attention had shifted towards maintaining the cohesion of his lands through more clandestine means. But with the arrival of Basil’s forces even this great leader had been forced into playing his part in the Cycles of Ruin—he was destined to become the last ruler of Empire Solar and Basil expected him to follow the script with dignity befitting his lofty position.

Emperor Osran was certainly dressed for the part with his gold trimmed clothes, complete with a dainty little crown, yet the titular ruler of this land himself was no more than a withered husk. His wizened eyes could barely focus on the demon standing before him. A man who’s regal presence in his prime years might have made him a sight to behold—a sovereign ruler of a land as vast as it was ancient—had turned frail and mentally feeble with the onset of old age. He was now little more than a shadow of his former self.

The dungeon keeper bowed his head to the Emperor out of professional courtesy, as one ruler to another. “I am Basil von Doom,” he said, introducing himself, “and I have come to extinguish the ambers of your civilization.”

The senile old man mumbled something in response to Basil’s cruel boast, but otherwise failed to stir from his wandering state. Osran appeared unable to fully comprehend the presence of the monster addressing him.

Basil shook his head in disappointment. “So, you really were just a figurehead after all,” he said as he circled the table. “Without the power Maiden Solar used to sustain you, old age must have caught up on you quickly. That is most unfortunate… I had hoped that we could converse freely.”

The Emperor mumbled to himself while the demon drew closer, but seemed ignorant of Basil’s presence. His hands held fast to the edge of the table, but his intentions remained unclear.

“I apologize for what I am about to do to you,” Basil said, “but we really need to have a talk.”

The dungeon keeper pulled an unusual looking cigar from his bandolier. The herbs that formed the core of the roll had a dark purple tint to them. Basil sparked a fire between his fingers and lit up the cigar, now firmly pressing it between his lips. Having drawn a few deep breaths to stoke the flame, he proceeded to blow the purple smoke into the face of the seemingly catatonic ruler of Empire Solar.

The old man was suddenly aroused from his lethargic state. A moment later his eyes caught the shape of the hulking demon standing next to him. Emperor Osran finally gave his reply, cursing the monster with his crackling voice. “I said, get out of my chamber, you ugly, bald, cretinous beast!”

Basil raised an eyebrow at the rude conduct of the Emperor. He extinguished the cigar against the surface of the table and stuffed it back inside the holster on his bandolier.

“I’ve already had my final meal,” the Emperor proclaimed and gestured at the empty plate lying on his table. He then casually dismissed the dungeon keeper with the wave of a hand. “Let me die in piece, you barbarous brute. Then you have my permission to rob my corpse.”

The Emperor seemed to be struggling with his body. Osran’s motions were jittery, yet the man himself seemed surprised by how quickly he could move his fingers. Clearly, the purple smoke had done more than to simply awaken him. Whatever stimulant now coursed through his aged body was probably pushing it above and beyond its normal limits.

“Calm yourself, Osran the Wise,” Basil said. “The moment of clarity you now enjoy precedes your death. Any sudden strain on your heart will only hasten the failure of your body, so it would be best if you remained seated.” He pointed to the cigar in his holster. “Your body was not meant to endure this kind of stimulation. It would be fair to say that I have just poisoned you, but you probably won’t feel like it until the very end. Do not fear, for I will make sure that your death comes swiftly and before the symptoms begin to kick in.”

The Emperor drew sharp and shallow breaths as he struggled with his jittering body. “What do you want from me?” he asked. “I won’t beg for mercy from you, beast. Take whatever you desire from my vaults and leave me be. I want to die alone.”

“It is not your treasure or crown that I seek, Your Majesty,” Basil explained. “I have not come to rob or extort you, only to talk.”

“Is that so?” the Emperor asked. “What else could a barbarian like you desire? Is the blood of my subjects not enough to quench your thirst? Am I to be drawn and quartered next? Is that why you have come? To torment me in person before you trample the last of our accomplishments under the boots and hooves of your savage horde?”

“I understand how terrible this whole situation must seem to you,” Basil said. “Please believe me when I say that I don’t take callous pleasure in the destruction that I have wrought upon your world.”

The Emperor scoffed. “You’re a butcher!”

“A fair assessment,” Basil admitted. “I am very much the monster that you think me to be. I care not for the lives that have been cut short in my passing. Such is the cycle of life and death: the races of kith build empires and monsters like me destroy them. I simply played my part to perfection, as did you.

“I am not here to judge you or to apologize for what I have done. I simply wished to express my condolences for your demise.” Basil bowed his head to the Emperor, “Well done. You fought well.”

The Emperor ran his fingers through his long white beard. “You’re a sentimental beast, aren’t you?” he noted. “Interesting… and you don’t intend to usurp my power? Am I to believe that you are doing all of this for no good reason at all? It’s not the throne or the claim to these lands that you desire? What strange meaning do you derive from this butchery, demon?”

Basil grinned in response to the Emperor’s statement. “Oh, I will be taking your throne alright,” he said, “but I have no use for any of your wealth or power. Yours’ is not the first world that I have conquered and it won’t be the last. I will depart these lands once your civilization has fallen. My job here will be done; my purpose complete.

“As for the beasts that I command, the monsters that your valiant soldiers have been fighting all this time—they were mere tools in all of this. They will be discarded once they have served their purpose. In time their numbers will dwindle and the remnants will scatter to the far corners of the realm. It was the rise of your civilization that brought them together in opposition to you and it will be your fall that will once again disperse them.”

“So, it is true then,” the Emperor said and lowered his head in defeat. “This was the Armageddon that was foretold. The End of Days…”

“It is not the end,” Basil corrected him. “Life will continue to blossom on this world for countless generations more. It’s just that the time has come for your civilization to pass into memory so that new ones might arise. This is all happening in accordance with the Cycles of Ruin. This dance of rise and fall has been playing out all across the universe since the dawn of time.”

The old man’s temper was rising, causing him to tremble with anger. “The outsiders were right to warn of your arrival! They told that a dark power would lead an army of monstrous beasts against me.” He shook his feeble head. “My ancestors were too proud to even ponder the possibility of our fall. And when you finally came, I was too weak to stop you… How could we have known? Who could have believed it?”

“A purge of a civilized world, once ordered by the Guild of Chaos, has never failed,” Basil said. “Do not torment yourself over your failure to defeat me. Your people never stood a chance against the fully fury of your world’s monsters united under my banner.”

“And what if we had killed all the monsters?” the Emperor asked. “Every last dragon, every damned orc, goblin and wandering troll; every wolf in the forest, every snake in the grass… What would you have done then? Used magic to lay our cities low; curses to kill my people in their thousands? What would have happened if we had eradicated the monsters from this world completely?”

“You do not realize the nature or the extent of forces arrayed against you,” Basil said. “It is not the monsters of this world alone that you face. I am but one of a thousand dungeon keepers, each with a retinue of servants that by themselves could lay low your armies in a day. Your forces are tiny compared to what lies beyond the boundaries of your world. The universe is as vast as it is indifferent to your suffering.”

The Emperor scoffed.

“—but I am not,” Basil continued. “I think that at the very least you deserve to know the true nature of your demise.”

The Emperor interrupted Basil with a sharp gesture of his hand. “Spare me your pity, demon. Just answer me this: was there really nothing that we could have done to prevent our fall?” Osran asked.

“There was nothing that you could have done,” Basil answered. “And if you hear pity in my words, Wise Emperor, then know that it comes from a place of understanding and respect. I did not come here to gloat over you, but to tell you that your people had accounted for themselves well, given the odds, which were never even remotely in your favor.”

The dungeon keeper placed himself on the opposite side of the Emperor’s table to illustrate his point. “There is no measure that I could give to help you realized the width of the chasm that is the difference between the power and forces we command,” he said. “That is why I used your own world’s monsters against you whenever I could—to make the fight as fair as possible; to let your soldiers maintain their dignity as they went down fighting against overwhelming odds, their bodies buried beneath the settling ashes of your burning civilization. The truth of their futile resistance was kept from them as a mercy. You, however, won’t share in their blissful ignorance, and for that, once more, I must apologize.”

“I sent my strongest champions against you,” the Emperor said. “Aidan and Nadia—they were the greatest heroes of this generation. Tell me, demon, did they at least put up a fight?”

Basil bowed his head in respect to the fallen. “They performed their task as well as could have been expected,” he answered. “They did not falter in their dedication to your cause and died with honor, having drawn my blood at the steps of my throne.”

“And Maiden Solar?” the Emperor asked. He looked to a crystal orb on a pedestal beside his bed. The orb was dormant; empty and cold. “I can’t sense her presence watching over my realm anymore. Have we failed her? Has she abandoned us?”

“She belongs to me now,” Basil explained. “I have captured her soul for my own purposes.” He brought forth the soul stone from his magic pouch and showed it to the Emperor. The crystalline prison pulsed with a warm golden glow.

The Emperor’s wrinkled face warped in disgust. “She was our guiding light,” he said. “She was our goddess and protector! I demand that you release her, demon!”

Basil dismissed the old man’s claims. “She was and still remains an elemental—a powerful force of nature to be sure—but no more divine than any other monster on this world.”

“She was no monster!” the Emperor insisted. “She was pure and bright!”

“No, she was a monster, pure and simple,” Basil said. “I have no reason or intention to deceive you, so please believe me when I tell you that there are only two kinds of creatures in this universe: monsters and kith. We can go on all day subcategorizing all the different strains of beasts, magical creatures and demi-humans that roam your world, but in the end they would all fall into one of the two categories: monsters and kith. The scales of the universe are held in balance by the violent interactions of these two opposing sides.”

Basil gestured towards the Emperor. “You and your ancestors hail from a race of mortal men—wholly separate from the beasts and nature’s elements around you. Human to human is kin, human to elf, dwarf and anything in-between is kith. That is all the distinction there is to your kind, while we are a thousand different races, similar only in our instinctual view of the world around us. All monsters share a deep understanding of their primal nature; the chaos of it. We accept it while kith always seek to shackle the laws of nature; to bend the rules of the universe to their will. You are desperate to weigh the scales in your favor, no matter the cost.”

“That is still an arbitrary division,” the Emperor declared.

“Not at all,” Basil insisted. “Kith build civilizations and monsters don’t. You seek progress where we seek balance. That is probably the easiest distinction to observe. Now, it does not mean that we can’t embrace certain aspects of each other’s world view. Monsters can even co-exist with kith kind, to an extent, but you always break that covenant. Your lust for power and the desire to master your mortality always renders any deals we make obsolete within a few generations. One generation; ten generations—it does not matter. Such hybrid societies always collapse. The races of kith are beholden to their instinctual desire for immortality and they will use any means available to them to achieve it, be it consorting with monsters or exterminating them, when it suits your goals.

“Your precious Maiden Solar, for example, was adopted out of utility. The holy elemental was a monster that your ancestors had taken to worshipping as a goddess. She, in turn, had been essentially domesticated by them, but there was never any true benevolence to be had in such an arrangement. There was no sorrow in her voice as she spoke of the people that she had sacrificed in defense of Empire Solar—her favorite toy—because she did not care for them. Yet you were more than happy to accommodate her, no matter how petty or cruel she showed herself to be—I have walked your halls and seen the tapestries of your past glories; of her boundless narcissism and your sheepish desire to placate her wrath. There can be no doubt that she is the centerpiece of your civilization, but she never stopped being a monster and you were made lesser people for indulging and worshipping her.”

“She was at times harsh, but no less than a mother should be towards her unruly children!” the Emperor said. “In spite of her flaws, which I am not beyond recognizing, she was still the beating heart of our civilization. And you… and you! You have crammed her golden splendor into a gemstone prison!”

Basil shrugged. “A trophy is a trophy,” he said. “Had your empire worshiped a dragon instead, I would have mounted its head over a fireplace in my Mansion. But, just to be honest with you, I have long since run out of fireplaces to decorate...”

The Emperor reached out for the glowing soul stone in Basil’s hand, but the dungeon keeper was quick to return it to his pouch. The desperation in Osran’s eyes betrayed his true state of mind on the matter—he truly believed in what he had said about Maiden Solar. In spite of his convictions, he remained collected enough to realize that whatever the monster standing before him was, it clearly outmatched even the power of Maiden Solar, so there was nothing he could do to aid her.

“What are your intentions with her?” the Emperor asked.

“To make good use of her power,” Basil replied. “I can see no better fate for my defeated enemies than to become a part of something greater. The legacy of your Maiden Solar is now to serve me as a source of arcane energy, not because I wish to bring her low, but because in defeating and subjugating her I have elevated her to a higher plane of existence. She serves a greater master now. There are many ways in which I could use her to bring down the next civilization in my path.” The dungeon keeper grimaced. “And I fear that she would very much enjoy doing it…”

“Why would you do this to us?” the Emperor asked. “Why did this butchery; this culling of our world have to happen? What’s the point of it all?”

Basil did his best to elaborate on the matter. “Try and think of it this way: you and your empire are but a grain of sand falling through the hourglass. It is my purpose to turn that hourglass over once enough sand has flowed through, but it must be done before all the sand has flowed through, because that would mean the end to your world. Whereas your grain had landed on top the last time, now it will form the foundations for civilizations that will follow.”

“But what’s the point of it?” the Emperor asked. “Why does this wheel of destruction go on turning?” The old man dragged his wrinkled fingers across the smooth surface of the table, as if tracing invisible lines. “We’ve found ruins on our world that are so old that there is no name for the people who once inhabited them. Cities and fortresses demolished thousands of years ago… were they the previous victims of your cycle?”

“They most likely were,” Basil confirmed. “But if you presume to think that their fall was unjust, then you should first consider that nothing good can last forever. A garden remains beautiful only as long as it is tended. Without the firm hand of the gardener or the cold touch of his blade the weeds begin to sprout and spread and the stronger plants overshadow and eradicate the lesser. The beauty of life rests not in its tenacity or the endless reproduction of what was before—the definition of a weed—but in the more exquisite and fragile forms, that give us hope and inspiration. There is nothing more beautiful than a single rose growing in the middle of a desert, because it invokes more meaning and emotion with its description alone than a whole jungle landscape would.

“Try and think of this cycle in terms of generational change,” Basil suggested. “Civilizations, just like gardens, are very much the reflection of the people that cultivate them. At the dawn of a civilization it is a beautiful and noble thing, shaped by great minds and brave souls, willing to experiment and seek perfection. There is much strife as it seeks to reign in the chaos around it and a lot of art and discovery is born from such experience. You enter a golden age of sorts.

“Once your glory days are behind you, however, stagnation and corruption always conspires to render the lives of the next generation worse than the one before it. It’s a subtle shift at first, so it is hard to notice for the kith living through the transition from a golden age to the twilight of their civilization. Their civilization reaches the peak of its splendor and begins to consolidate power in the hands of fewer and fewer kith. Your people inevitably find less purpose and happiness in their daily lives. Where once their struggling ancestors could take great pleasure in every hard won meal, now even the worst excesses won’t be enough to satiate their appetites. The demand for luxury that once added spice to their lives now becomes a crippling addiction. Their lives grow safer and longer, but are spent on less and less meaningful endeavors. The civilization reaches the peak of its dominance and stability, but the maintenance of the status quo becomes almost unbearable. Eventually everything you once held dear, be they morals, virtues or the countless lives of your subjects, will be sacrificed to keep the civilization from crumbing under its own weight.”

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“That can’t be always true,” the Emperor suggested. “You can’t just categorically say that we will be worse off tomorrow than we are today!”

“It is inevitable,” Basil insisted. “The pattern of stagnation is ancient and self-fulfilling. Civilizations do not last forever. And when they try to, they end up tyrannical and rotten—an ugly sight even for us, the monsters, to behold.

“On every world we have ever discovered it plays out the same way,” Basil said. “Sooner or later a single kith empire will rise above the rest. Through their skill in diplomacy or war they will unite or subjugate their world. Their initial values, religious beliefs or morals will not matter in the long run. An admirable founder always paves the way for a tyrant down the line and then it’s nothing but misery from there on out. Century after century they will expand their domain, eradicating all that they find objectionable: beast races, lesser foreign dominions, even your fellow kinsmen in civil wars. The the spiral of death follows a simple path: kith versus nature; kith versus monster; kith versus kith and, finally, kin versus kin.

“Once this pattern of self-cannibalization begins to unfold, the Guild of Chaos orders a dungeon keeper to intervene. We rally your enemies, tear out the rotten foundations of your faltering civilization and watch it crumble.

“It is not always an easy task, but we always prevail. We bring an end to a growing cycle of destruction and misery by a single act of unimaginable cruelty—we erase the entire civilization, its people, history and culture. Then the world is left to heal.”

“I don’t see how your solution saves anything,” the Emperor said. “Is the result not the same? Don’t we end up dead either way?”

Osran slammed his trembling fist against the table. “My ancestors laid claim to this land with their blood, sweat and tears. We established a civilization so powerful that we were able to subjugate all of our enemies, be they monsters or kith. We have struggled so long to rise above the rest and for what? Are we supposed to just lie down and die, because some foreign invader orders us to?”

The dungeon keeper sighed. “At this moment you are at the height of your power,” Basil said. “You are currently at the top of the curve. Tomorrow brings only darkness and disappointment, for there is nothing left for your civilization to discover other than the depths of its own depravity or the capacity for evil that your kith hearts hold.

“You have been rewarded with glorious death at a time when you were still more benevolent than cruel,” the dungeon keeper declared. “If not swept away by my hand then by the hands of your own descendants this Empire Solar would have been turned into a wicked shadow of its former self. There were never any brighter days ahead. This is your finest hour. That is why I have not sent forth my most powerful minions to take than from you. At the very least you deserve a valiant, glorious defeat and not a crushing one.”

“So, we are destined to fall by the wayside of history?” the Emperor asked. “If we are doomed to be monsters in the end, then what does that make you? Do you really think yourself a savior? Is this the best solution that you could come up with? To burn and smash apart all that a great civilization has accomplished just so that the survivors can claw through the ruins in search of meager sustenance?”

Basil smiled bitterly. “The cycle was established long before I was born; carved into the foundations of the universe, it would seem. I only enforce it. And I won’t make excuses for it. Every word that I have spoken has my full conviction behind it. The downtrodden worlds that I have liberated—yes, by force—now have a future to look forward to. It took the death of an entire generation, but a hundred more can now be born without the burdens of a failing civilization to bear. The children are happier there, not knowing the price their ancestors had to pay. They will strive to excel in their crafts and discoveries, where your subjects were doomed to maintain the crumbling legacy of their ancestors at the behest of tyrants and false gods.

“Your champions, for instance—the twins—they would be considered merely average when measured against the wild kith of a world recently purged. Humans, dwarves and elves, thrown into such an inhospitable environment, inevitably grow to exceed the power and wisdom of the civilized kith that will be born generations later on the land that their ancestors tamed. And yes, even the survivors of this cycle are destined to forge a new civilization. It will be glorious for a while, cultured and noble. Then it will begin to decay. Then monsters like me will come to purge it again to give way for a fresh start.

“That is how the universe is kept in balance; how life is allowed to flourish. When kith are few, the world is theirs to claim—its secrets and treasures all. Once they multiply beyond reason and force the other creatures into near extinction, the hands of fate shift their favor from kith to monsters. Where an orc might have been a common foe for a founder of a civilization, by its latter stages of development the green beast will overpower all but the strongest of heroes.”

“But we still held them back!” the Emperor insisted. “For generations now we have faced the fact that our knights could no longer keep the beasts at bay. Where a tenth of our society was once involved in some capacity in the suppression of the monsters, now a full quarter is required to keep them back from our lands. But we have risen to that challenge!”

“That is because you create ever more powerful tools and magic devices to enforce your dominance,” Basil explained. “In spite of the universe telling you that your time is at an end by shifting the scales of power over to the other side, you have a knack for adapting in ways most unreasonable, yet efficient.”

“And that is where you come in,” the Emperor said, “to take that challenge away from us? Can you not let this stupid cycle just play itself out? What gave you the right to intervene?”

“We are forced to intervene,” Basil said. “The solution that we provide for the rampancy of civilization is crude, but it is such due to our nature. We call ourselves monsters, because we remember the role that we were designed to play in the Cycles of Ruin. We merely usurped the burden of correcting the mistakes of civilizations, for it was abandoned by the true masters of this universe.

“There used to be another way of dealing with your problems,” Basil revealed. “Eons ago, long before the Guild was formed, a third kind of creature roamed this universe. And they were magnificent.”

“The Avatars,” the Emperor whispered.

Basil nodded in agreement. “They are the piece that is missing,” he explained. “Where they once shaped and guided the civilizations of kith, you now must rely on your own faulty judgments and, inevitably, must suffer the consequences of your actions. Where they used to topple tyrannies and bring justice to downtrodden worlds now the monsters must intervene. Their role in balancing the scales of the universe was so great that even now, thousands of years since the passing of the last known Avatar even your twice-purged world has kept their memory alive.”

“We did well enough without them!” the Emperor insisted. “No matter how strong our enemies grew, we still found ways of vanquishing them.”

The dungeon keeper grunted. “There are things… that kith were not meant to invent,” Basil explained. “Magic and technology have a tenuous relationship at the best of times. I know from personal experience that you do not wish to suffer the consequences of wanton discovery. There are things in the universe; powers and machines that hold the potential to bring about greater devastation than monsters ever could. It is folly to invent something that can be best used to destroy oneself, yet kith often dabble in forbidden knowledge, damned the consequences of their discoveries. From necromancy to alchemy and the merging of flesh, magic and steel—no topic of inquiry is off limits once your kind grows bold or desperate enough. Ultimately, your discoveries only accelerate your fall.”

“So, you cull us before we grow too advanced?” the Emperor asked. “It sounds to me like you are doing it out of fear of what we might become. You want to limit our power while you still can.”

Basil nodded. “You are not entirely wrong about that.” The dungeon keeper ran his hand over his face as he recalled one of his past encounters with an advanced civilization. “I have seen what happens when you succeed in your pursuit of immortality; when your appetite for power is finally matched by your skill in creating arcane machinery.

“There was this one world, Hulanar,” he said. “The people there had devised a way of disguising themselves in the Astral Sea. The Guild could not locate them in time, so we could not intervene to stop their madness before it had consumed them. Their arcane deception had bought them just enough time to complete the tools of their own destruction.

“When the Guild finally discovered a way to reach their world, I was assigned to purge it. When I breached the magic veil that they had shrouded their civilization in, I discovered what had become of them, absent the cycle; absent the intervention you seem all too eager to condemn.

“I had come to Hulanar to destroy a civilization, but found the task already accomplished—taken to the bitter extreme. It took my forces but a day to confirm that the world was completely dead. Neither kith nor monsters, not even insects remained. The destruction of Hulanar had been so complete that it was stricken from the list of inhabitable worlds entirely.

“You see, by combining flesh, metal and magic into horrid arcane contraptions, the bright kith of Hulanar had discovered a way of siphoning souls on an industrial scale. Their technocrat rulers had spent centuries suppressing their people into a class of near-mindless slaves by the use of cruel spells and psychological terror, enforced by highly advanced arcane constructs. Then, once their planet-wide network of soul sucking machines was finished, they turned them on and their entire world was consumed in an effort to transfer their flesh and blood rulers into the immortal bodies of machines.”

“What happened?” the Emperor asked. “Did they succeed?”

Basil frowned. “When I arrived, I found only arcane constructs roaming the land—heartless guards, looking for a population to bully into submission. I soon discovered the fate of their masters and our encounter was an experience that I will never forget. I found the mechanical bodies of the technocrats sitting in a room at an empty table, staring with empty eyes at the empty plates and cups before them.

“They were silently weeping, you see, for their incredible achievement had brought them nothing but misery. Their desire for immortality had come from their mortal kith souls, born of their limitations as creatures of flesh and blood. But now they found themselves no more than hollow husks. Their minds had been transferred successfully and they had grown powerful beyond reason, but everything else that had once driven them in life had now been left behind; lost among the millions of skeletons that now littered the streets and factories of their empty cities. In their blind quest for immortality they had failed to consider the consequences. There had been no Avatar among them to keep them from this path and no monster powerful enough to destroy their civilization before it could destroy its entire world.”

Basil drew a deep breath and sighed heavily. “We live in a universe of boundless opportunities,” he said. “Life is fragile, so it always seeks more power to sustain itself and grow. Immortality forever beckons the races of kith, so they strive to better themselves. But sometimes in their quest for enlightenment they overreach and need to be parted from their dangerous discoveries. Violence is applied, because if the death of a generation does not set the boundaries, then the extinction of their entire world will.

“Hulanar was my first encounter with the madness that drives your kind into extinction. There are thousands of dead worlds in the ledgers of the Guild just like it—failures each and every one of them and we feel responsible for their fall. In the absence of Avatars, we have taken up the mantle of protecting the ones that remain, but by our very nature, we can only preserve them through acts of calculated destruction. And do not presume that you could do better in our place, because you, the races of kith, are the cause of the problem. You are a garden onto itself and we appreciate your expressions of art and valor, but, if left untended for too long, you begin to sprout weeds which spread until all beauty has been stripped from the world. Only we have the will and the power to keep you from destroying yourselves.”

The Emperor pondered the dungeon keeper’s story for a while.

Basil seemed inclined to do the same, but snapped himself out of reminiscing by changing the subject. “So, I hope you won’t mind if I nick your throne on my way out?” he asked, gesturing towards the door. “I have a collection of them, and, well, yours is nice. I would like to take it as a trophy of sorts, before my monsters tear up the palace.”

The Emperor ignored Basil’s frivolous question and pursued his own line of thought instead.

“From what you have told me, you have spent your whole life laying waste to civilizations,” the old Emperor said. “You seem to think that you understand us, but have you ever tried to… build one yourself? Have you ever raised your hand in defense of a village and not in anger against it?”

“I feel no anger,” Basil said, “but I understand the destructive nature of my actions. I don’t much care for empire building—that was the passion of your ancestors. Mine have been dungeon keepers. We burn what you build.”

The Emperor nodded. “Still, if you have spoken nothing but truth to me, then I know that you must think yourself on the right side of history,” he said. “I am willing to accept the folly of my ways. May the next civilization rise to be better than ours…”

“It will end the same,” Basil asserted.

“But how do you know that?” the Emperor asked. “How can you judge the choices of the kith when you have never lived among us? You have never walked the path that you condemn.”

“Don’t presume that I am ignorant of your way of life,” Basil said. “I won’t pretend that I understand the nature of civilization better than the kith do, but I too possess experience and wisdom that you have never had to contend with. I have seen things that your mind would fail to comprehend and, unfortunately, much of it has to do with the horrors that the kith create. I don’t believe I can fix your way of life and neither do I think that it should be changed. There is nothing wrong with you or your people, Osran. You did well for yourselves, but now it’s time for me to fulfill my duty and close the book on your civilization. Such is the way of the universe.”

The old emperor forced himself up from the table and stumbled over to his bedside. Osran grasped at a sword than had been placed upon the sheets. The weapon was clearly an artifact with some degree of magic enchantment. It gave off an aura of power and a faint blue glow that shimmered up and down the flat of the blade.

Basil observed the Emperor’s actions with great interest. It was unlikely that the old man would choose to attack him now, but such a turn of events was not out of the question entirely.

The Emperor was so feeble that he had to use both of his hands just to pick up the sword. He was visibly struggling with its weight even as he lowered it at his side.

“This is the ancestral sword of my bloodline,” he explained. “For a thousand years it has been in my family. Over forty generations of chieftains, kings, queens and emperors. And now I offer it to you.”

Osran approached the dungeon keeper. “I surrender my crown and domain to you,” he said. “You have won. I won’t argue with you any longer. I just want it all to be over with.”

The Emperor removed his crown and placed it on the table.

The dungeon keeper shook his head. “I cannot spare you or the people of the land,” Basil said. “The purge must be concluded.”

“I am not asking you to spare anyone,” the Emperor said. “I am no fool. I know that these are the final days of my people.”

With anguish radiating from his eyes, the old man glared up at the dungeon keeper towering over him. “What I want from you is a simple promise.”

“I will make no promises,” Basil said.

The Emperor grimaced. “A consideration then,” he said. “Would you at least listen to me?”

Basil nodded.

“I want you to try and understand us better,” the old man said. “If this is how it always plays out, then the fault cannot simply lie with us.

“I know that you owe me nothing. If the universe truly is as large as you say it is, then the lives of my people must mean nothing. But you alone hold so much power that there must be something that you can do to make sense of this endless cycle of destruction. Monsters and kith; the Cycles of Ruin—there must be a better solution to this impasse somewhere out there…”

“I wish that it were that simple,” Basil said. “I have never seen an alternative that would work as reliably as a hard reset. Tyranny has always come to pass. Sooner or later a world must be purged of its dominant civilization, lest it is irreversibly damaged by it.”

“Then I will pray for both of our sakes that you can find a miracle solution,” the Emperor said. “It would be a shame if my parting words gave you no heed for consideration, as if I had spoken them into the void.

“As for me,” he said and turned the blade around so that the tip of the sword was pointed at his heart, “I will now follow my ancestors into the oblivion.”

The Emperor struggled with the sword for a while, trying to hold on to the heavy blade, but his frail arms failed him. At this point he did not even possess the strength to fall on his sword as a defeated ruler should.

Basil positioned himself behind the old emperor. The dungeon keeper reached around the man to help and steady his hands. The tip of the sword once more pressed up against his chest. The old man drew quick short breaths as he began leaning into it. There was a quick flash of agony across his face as the blade pierced his flesh, but he did not cry out in pain. Blood ran down the length of the sword and began to pool at his feet. The Emperor’s white robes turned dark red. Soon the man’s life had been extinguished and his body went limp.

The dungeon keeper eased the Emperor’s body down onto the floor and gently pulled the sword from the dead man’s chest. He left him lying in a dignified position and bowed his head in a parting gesture.

“Well then,” Basil said as he picked up the Emperor’s crown from the table. “With your passing we are one step closer to declaring our victory.”

***

When Basil emerged from the Emperor’s bedchamber, he found his rangers locked in a standoff with the squire from before. As invited, the boy had followed them up the stairs. Holding onto his sword with both hands he defiantly stood in the dungeon keeper’s path, glaring with disgust at the cloaked minions who had kept him from reaching the Emperor. He was shaking from exhaustion, but did not step aside even as Basil waved his hand, implying that he should do so.

“Do we have your permission to kill him, Master?” asked a ranger. His arrow was pointed at the boy’s head.

Basil stepped forward and positioned himself in-between the rangers and the lone imperial defender. “You seem… a little stronger than before,” the dungeon keeper said as he pulled up his manual.

As Basil surveyed the information on the squire in the pages of his enchanted book, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the boy’s power level had climbed from 5 up to 6. Likewise, a [Diehard] attribute had been added to his modest list of traits as a result of his near-death experience. He was going to prove exceedingly hard to kill in the future for any creature at around his power level.

“Your determination to serve your master to the bitter end is impressive,” Basil told the youth. “I appreciate your valor, but it is no longer necessary for you to lay down your life in his defense.”

“I will fight for my Emperor to the very end!” the boy answered. “What have you done with him, demon?”

Basil examined the bloodied sword in his hand. Should I tell him? He wondered. Would he throw his life away if I did? Or should I…

The dungeon keeper grabbed the blade of the Emperor’s sword with one hand and pulled off the hilt with the other. “[Dispel],” he whispered and the arcane bonds of the weapon shattered. Its enchantments withered away into a cloud of magic smoke. He then threw the dormant blade of the disassembled sword at the feet of the squire.

“That is an adamantium blade,” Basil said as he pointed to the remains of the Emperor’s sword. “A better material you will not find. Use it to fashion a new weapon for yourself. Use that weapon to defend what remains of your people once the monsters are done ravaging this world. You cannot stop the fall of your civilization, but what you can do is to gather the survivors.”

“I will never abandon my Emperor!” the squire proclaimed. “I ask again, what have you done with him, demon?”

“That is Osran’s blood on the blade,” Basil answered.

The boy’s eyes opened wide in horror. “You’ve… killed him?” He let go of his own weapon and fell to his knees before the blood-soaked blade.

“I gave him a warrior’s death,” Basil answered. “He deserved nothing less.”

The dungeon keeper let the squire grieve for a moment longer before continuing. “Listen to me carefully, boy, there are wetlands to the north of your capital that you can use to hide your people. Beyond them, further north, lies the mountain range that you call the Bitter March. Take your fellow kith into the mountains. They will have a chance at survival for as long as they remain there.

“With time all of your cities, all of your fields and roads will fall to ruin. The only people who will survive the collapse of your civilization will be those with the will to abandon the old ways.

“Rebuild in the mountains and one day you descendants will return to the fertile valleys and forests below. In time you will reclaim your world, but right now there is nothing that you can do to stop the horde.”

“Why are you telling me this, demon?” the squire asked.

“I did just destroy your entire civilization,” Basil answered. “I see no harm in pointing one survivor towards the path to recovery.”

Having said his piece, Basil placed a finger to his head and activated a teleportation spell that he proceeded to cast on the confused youth. “[Greater Teleportation]!”

The boy vanished into thin air. His sword and the remains of the Emperor’s blade disappeared along with him. The spell had moved the squire far away from the besieged city. Where exactly he had landed only the dungeon keeper himself knew, but it was safe to say that the ongoing survival of the boy was now no longer in his hands.

Basil’s minions moved in to surround the dungeon keeper. “The master’s ability to teleport is on cool-down,” one of them announced. “Secure the perimeter.”

“Oh, settle down!” Basil ordered. “There isn’t a creature on this world that could threaten me. Let’s just go and meet up with Elnora. I bet she’s been having more fun with this siege than I have.

“And grab the throne! I still want to add it to my collection.”