One by one, the children turned towards Sean, standing on that giant mound of rubble as the storm clouds began to break. Piper, the oldest girl, glanced at all of them and then said solemnly: “We find for the prosecution.” And then the world jumped. It felt like I’d lost time- Aslan was suddenly thirty feet forward of where he’d been, dead on his side in the middle of the platform. Skylar was standing over him, a bloodied knife falling from her hand. Sean had his pistol out and the children were standing still, shocked. “Oh, Skylar, no.” he said, despairingly.
An Intelligence score of 31 and Perception in the mid-20’s let me catch up quicker than I otherwise would have, even as I stammered “Sean, wha-” what happened? Oh, I see. Aslan was doing that same thing he did to their brother and from our perspective it looks like a time skip. It couldn’t have lasted long, it would wear off on me. But that means he was about to eat someone- SEAN. I whipped my head around too late, ignoring even the flare of white radiance from the no-doubt resurrecting body of Aslan. Randall Flagg was already leaning over Sean, that strange blood-soaked knife in hand. It flashed once, across Sean’s throat. I screamed.
Aslan wasn’t the only one with powers. Time stopped, for me. Quite literally. The entire scene froze, even the pounding rain. A Time Stop spell that I had placed on myself with a Contingency, as part of my buff sequence. I’d set it to activate if anyone in my group was in a life threatening situation. With the equivalent of three or four “Rounds” of Pathfinder time to act, I immediately dropped into the time-shifted parallel dimension where one round was equivalent to a full year. I had time to think, here. Time to work the problem. I began summoning efreets.
I hit Sean with every healing and preserving magic I could. Nothing. I tried to pull his soul out and seal it in a jar. Nothing. I tried to summon a clone body for him to swap into if he died- why hadn’t I done that before- Nothing. Everything conflicted with the magic of the knife. It resisted any attempt to save him. Skylar had told us, briefly, what Aslan had promised them- that it would kill anything it was used on- and that appeared to be an absolute. On the one hand it made sense- Aslan intended it to be used on himself, it had to be beyond lethal. On the other hand- well, there was no other hand, but this was so unfair. If it was a compulsion or a poison it probably wouldn’t have worked because Sean’s story ran counter to Aslan’s. But it seemed to have just blasted his soul right out of his body. Some horrible part of me was wondering about the implications of that for offensive Pathfinder magic even as I panicked. Even in the time stop, viewed from my gateway in the other dimension, I could see Sean’s body flaking and beginning to turn to black ash, the way Randall’s kill at our bunker had done. As soon as time resumed there wouldn’t even be a body. Stolen away by that magic.
The knife. Maybe I could destroy it? I tried to rip it out of Flagg’s hands but it was frozen in the moment, and the rules of Time stop prevented direct magical effects. “You cannot move or harm any items in another creature’s possession,” it said. It didn’t say anything about non-destructive heating. In my alternate world, I wished together a bomb-pumped x-ray laser and used my matter/antimatter pocket-dimension as a source. There might be dilation issues if I tried to fire it across the time-shifted barrier of the dimensional gates, so I thrust the whole array through a gate into real space and fired at the knife. Substantially more energy than a conventional nuke plant was capable of producing in a day was dumped into that little metal blade within microseconds, but it didn’t melt or even evaporate. In some ways it was invulnerable, but not completely immune to physics. So it heated up, glowing white-hot and then blinding, radiating hard across the spectrum in a way that was going to be a real problem for anyone on that platform without access to regeneration in the next couple of hours. It simply evaporated Randall Flagg’s hand, even at the incredible time dilation we were operating at, and would have gone on to slag the rest of the platform as well had I not teleported it into the sun the second its protection from my magic no longer applied to it.
I paused then, to consider, and made my first mistake. I thought I had time, in my pocket world. Years before Sean’s body even began to collapse, back in the real. But the second I took my eyes off of that gate, the instant I let that asshole out of my sight, I heard him. A throat clearing from behind me. I whirled around and there he was, the Man in Black in the flesh. Not even worse for wear from his encounter with the laser- well, minus a hand, but he took it in stride. “Told you I’d still be walkin’ when your bones turned to dust. Well, his bones, I guess. I keep what I kill, no use fighting it.”
I didn’t bother with a response, hitting him with a line of fire breath as I telepathically commanded every simulacrum in my planet-sized dimension to either dogpile him or teleport in for a similar attack. The breath didn’t even phase him. He grinned at me, the nasty kind, the kind of smile from a person who knew he’d just cut you deep and there was nothing you could do about it. ‘Now you don’t think I’d be dumb enough to come here in person, do you? This is just a little spell like you’re so fond of, to give you your marching orders. I know how much you hate me talkin, darlin, so I’ll be brief. I imagine you’ve got a lot on your plate now that you’re newly single and all.”
I could feel nothing but panic and cold rage. I tamped it down and contacted the simulacra. He must have slipped the Time Stop much earlier than expected- made sense, considering. Get me his position in the real world. Scry every fucking square inch of it if you have to. In the meantime I’d talk. “You know I’m not going to do anything that helps you.” He cackled and the sound sent chills down my spine. It was like someone who had never known humor except by description alone. I knew where I’d heard that eerie laughter before. The Coordinator. It sounds just like the Coordinator. That phone call in the department store. Had it been him? Or his master? What is his plan, here?
He was still slapping his knee. “Oh honey, you haven’t done anything but help me! That’s what makes my job so fun, you know. Listen, this is a gas, but I’ve got places to go, corpses to make. Here’s your helpful hint for the day- Big Kitty’s headed for the tower now that you’ve powered him up and you have, oh, I’d say five minutes real time to stop him. Chop chop!”
“Wait.” I stopped him, before he could turn through the air and vanish in front of me. He looked back, expectantly. Hoping to see tears. I don’t think he liked what he saw, instead. “I’ve got a message for you. I have a feeling you think you’ve won. You’re the chess master, and we’re all moving into the end game on your board. I’ve read all of that before. But I know you, Man In Black. I know what you were made for. You aren’t the devil. You aren’t even the villain today. Your job in a story is to put everyone in their right places, and then die.” He frowned, and I knew I’d struck a nerve. I turned away, dismissing him with contempt. “You’re public transport and I’m done with this ride.” I called off the search for him. I know where he’ll be. Sent a telepathic message to the Dog, instead.
The second I was sure he was gone, I collapsed. Everything I’d said to Sean, everything he’d said to me, in the last few days. It all came rushing back. He knew. He knew one of us was likely to die here, to a reversal of Aslan’s story if nothing else, and he knew that as long as he was still the narrator he could make it himself. “You idiot,” I cried. Even as I said it I knew I didn’t mean it, but “You stupid selfish bastard, ” maybe it helped just a little bit. I thought back to how he’d been, in our time in this pocket world. He’d already made up his mind to take the hit if one of us had to. He didn’t share it with me because he knew I’d stop him. Knew I had to be the one to stay on the board. And then the Lion… he stood there and faced Aslan, knowing none of us could help. To do all that and live, only to die miserably to that ratfucker seconds later . So suddenly. So completely. Despite every precaution and protection. How can it end like this?
I don’t know how long I lay there, overcome by the whole range of human emotion. Pride and awe and love and black, black despair. It might have been days. I couldn’t process. There was no rush. Five minutes out there was fifty years in here. But eventually that sense of urgency arose again, all the same. I clung to it, wouldn’t look away from it. I couldn’t take time to think, right now, or I might not get up again. It flashed through me like lightning. He was dead. Despite all my power, all the protections, killed by a knock-off Devil conjured up by a hack from Maine. I choked back a sob. Focus, Haley. I stuffed it all down deep until only the mission remained. I glanced at the portal. Sure enough, the top of that great mound out in the real world was empty, devoid of kids and Lion and Flagg long before the Time Stop should have expired. Guess that enchantment didn’t apply to them either.
I spent some minutes preparing. It was clear by now that having every spell in Pathfinder didn’t make us invulnerable or even close to it- there were trumps and trumps to those trumps, and it would take a savvy manipulator of stories to win this battle. Still I refreshed every buff I could. Prepared an arsenal of kinetic impactors, calculated to deliver maximum force without causing nuclear events when released in-atmosphere. Built several more iterations of the bomb-pumped laser. Compressed enough energy into one demiplane that the interior collapsed into a black hole. That was when I checked myself. You’re building weapons to end worlds, in here. None of this applies. If this was a story, the rules wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t expect to simply show up and erase my final enemy from the face of the earth. I made other plans, instead. I didn’t think about Sean. Finally I was ready. My first task was to find the Captain I’d met before.
---
As it turned out, he was having problems of his own. Some time during our talks at the makeshift Stone Table, Aslan had ordered the remainder of his forces to launch an assault on the stadium. And it wasn’t a stadium anymore, I noticed with a start as I exited my teleport in the air above it- it was a fortress, a vast column of stone flanked on every side by defense positions. So that’s what he meant by tower. The soldiers who’d come to Midland City were dug in up and down the structure, but it wasn’t doing them much good. The noise I gated into was overwhelming. An attack helicopter of some sort had targeted Captain Kitchener’s section of the wall, and his men were hunkered behind parapets all along it, dead or dying. The stone might as well have been soft cheese to the autocannon on that thing. It might have been a threat to me, even now, had I let it live.
I blinked and a kinetic impactor, a tungsten brick traveling at around mach 20, exited a gate underneath the vehicle. It simply ceased to be, vomiting upwards and backwards in a trail of metal and fire. The special forces scaling the wall I erased with precise releases of energy, barely even scarring the battlement. The ones I could see inside the walls, coming up via secret passage, I dealt with via similar means. I preferred non-lethality where possible, but mind-affecting spells would fade too quickly and my patience for these men was at an all time low. Still, I tried to get ahold of myself as I landed. I touched down in front of Captain Kitchener and his men. Several of them shot me. I paid them no mind. I was a sixteen foot tall, thirty-foot long armored monster and they’d had a rough day. Conventional arms were of very little threat to me, anyway. “Captain Kitchener.”
He waved his arm at the rest of them. I had to give him credit, he was cool under pressure. “Cease fire, goddamnit! Ceasefire. Mrs… McCarthy, wasn’t it? You’re bigger than the last time I saw you.” His pupils were enormously dilated- so maybe less cool and more combat shock, I assessed. I settled onto my belly on the battlements, both to get closer to him and to avoid giving any easy targets to the oncoming forces of Aslan’s army. I threw up a couple force walls anyway, just to be safe. No more risks.
“Yes, magic will do that. Captain, I need your help. And you need my help. Your men need to get out of here. This fight isn’t about them, and they can’t win it. I can throw a gate down, and get all of you out, but I need you to coordinate the evac. I also need to know if there’s a room in this tower with four thrones.”
He shook his head, trying to come to terms with the new reality. “I… none of this makes sense. Can you tell me what’s going on?” I sighed, and pulled him into the pocket dimension. Better to have this conversation here, where we wouldn’t be wasting time and lives. He stared around, awestruck, and stumbled backwards a few steps. I kept forgetting the effect the vast planet-sized Dyson Sphere had on newcomers. “Oh what the fuck. ” I read him in on what was going on, and gave him a chance to calm down. Eventually we had an understanding. He sat on the grass of the park, rifle in his lap, staring up at the vast city-forest curving away in every direction. “So, I knew magic was real, but this… this scale. You’re saying this Lion has more power than this? ”
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I nodded. “As I am discovering, yes. And he has your commander’s children, is using them as pawns. He’s not a good guy, and he can’t be allowed to win here, but… he and I have been manipulated. Set on some kind of collision course. I’m not sure why, yet, but I expect that the man manipulating us doesn’t want either of us to win. None of that is material to you. You need to get your people out of the way.”
He considered. “The bugs? What about them?” He gave me a hard look. “You’re already evacuating them aren’t you.” I nodded, and he sighed. “Waste of god damn time and lives, same as every other deployment. Look, set up your doorway on the far side of the stadium from the battle and I’ll spread the word around. But I need to talk to the Colonel, first. He’s probably down in the courtyard. Can you standby until I give the word? Maybe cover the tower, shield our people and take some of the heat off? I saw what you did to that Apache earlier.”
I smiled and I don’t think it looked particularly human from the way he shuddered. “Captain, it would be my pleasure.”
---
The battle outside was short-lived after I involved myself. I ordered up a phone for Roy and gave my end to a simulacrum to monitor. Then I summoned about ten thousand more of my slightly-downscaled clone sisters, equipped them all with wands of Summon Monster IV and Detonate, and simply rolled over Aslan’s army like a tide. A half-sized copy of a dragon was still a dragon, after all, and an army of them was harder than anything the Lion could field. I couldn’t hit his men with enchantments and expect them to stick for long , but conjuration was fair game, I figured. Anyone on foot was caught by dozens of earth elementals sprouting from the ground in every direction with orders to disarm and subdue. Anything more hardened than a light truck was swarmed and, if that failed, subjected to hundreds of grenade-like explosions. I didn’t want to kill, and I avoided it in all but a few cases, but non-lethal means only went so far when everyone was armed. Clusters of dragons descended on anything that stood up to my aerial barrage, tearing apart armor, discarding occupants and melting interiors with abandon. Some of my copies were killed by the scattered return fire, but they simply dissolved into ash and snow as the bullets tore them apart. I lost nothing. I had nothing left to lose. I felt desolate. At least, I consoled myself, I could make sure he regretted ever coming here.
As I watched the pummeling of Aslan’s army, and the withdrawal of the army units from the battlements, the call came from Roy. “Haley, there’s a nuclear device in the service tunnels. You were right, the Colonel is unfit.” I began spinning up a Dimension Door to the interior, even as I heard Aslan arrive and Roy began screaming “ Now, Haley, get down here NOW.” I stepped through from the last dying rays of sunlight into a dim and shadowy vaulted interior, covering the courtyard that had been at one point a stadium’s field. Delmutt had done her job, I saw- the infomorphs were safely evacuated. Aslan and a platoon of armed men stood on one side of the field, opposite the Colonel. More of his men had apparently just finished executing the wounded in the field hospital. Why did he even bother sending men against the outside? As a floor show? Is he just stepping in time with some narrative beat? In the old man’s hand was a detonator, millimeters from activation. Without my lifting a finger Aslan’s men all received human-scale kinetic impactors from my gates, simply puffing away into red mist with only muffled thwacks. I motioned Roy out of the room and he took the hint, exiting at a dead sprint, phone still to his ear.
Just the three of us now. Aslan’s brow twitched, and he turned to me. He was bigger now. His death and resurrection had empowered him. He swelled with power- it was like the room was illuminated by his presence. “So, Dragon. It will be you and me after all.”
I wasn’t in the mood for yet another standoff. “You know we’ve been played, this whole time. Flagg wants us to fight, and kill each other. The Colonel’s bomb is his trump in case one of us survives.”
The Lion nodded. “So it has always been, between him and I. But evil will shall evil mar, as the saying goes.” He turned toward the Colonel, no doubt intent on pulling the same stalk-and-kill maneuver that had left my husband vulnerable, minutes ago. I felt the air begin to thicken, this time, but I shook it off. Won’t work on me twice.
I pulled him up short. “Try it and I set the bomb off myself.”
He and the Colonel looked at me incredulously. Aslan spoke again, “You’d hold us all hostage, then? Even the children? Even knowing, as you do, that I’d likely survive?”
I had to sell this. Had to buy time. I tapped into that place I’d been ignoring, and stared straight into his eyes. Sent every ounce of pain and madness and rage straight at him. He actually recoiled, a step. “Go after him and die. You broke rule three, asshole. You killed my husband. The only reason this planet exists right now is because I’d rather beat you utterly, than take a pyrrhic victory and start from scratch. I will kill as many people as I have to, as long as you are one of them.” Untrue, but he didn’t need to know that. He needed to believe he was dealing with a mad woman, if I had any hope of keeping the Colonel alive.
The Colonel laughed. “Well, I don’t know who you are but I like your style. I suppose we have a Mexican standoff. Terms, Lord? I believe I’d like my children back, if that’s on the table.”
The Lion rumbled. “It is not. I offer no terms. They will be seated, and then you will die. Your soul will travel beyond my sight and you will face oblivion eternal.” The Colonel shuddered at that, but didn’t budge. My eyes narrowed- Aslan was waiting out the clock, counting on Flagg to continue the dance.
They looked at me. I stood up and paced in a small circle, swiveling my neck so that my eyes never left Aslan. “I want you off my world. Everything else is negotiable. Colonel, we can make common cause here. If you’ll hold your bomb, I promise you’ll see him gone and your kids alive, before this is through.”
The Colonel considered . “Yesterday, I thought they were dead. Today, I knew they were alive but in the jaws of a monster I couldn’t hope to fight. Now you’re offering me hope and I don’t know how to react. I’m strung out, and tired, and I think I’ve been high on despair for a long time now, fighting a losing battle from the moment the Rapture happened. He looks like the savior here, but you’re the one offering me salvation,” he mused. I could sympathize with him, if he wasn’t a half-inch from annihilating his own men, his kids, and the city he’d sworn to protect.
We waited, the three of us. Aslan, standing in his battle-plate, feeling no need to make a move yet. Me, risking everything like a fool to try and save one more life and buy more time for my allies. The Colonel, torn between hope of a path to victory and one last stab at his enemy. For a moment the world hung in the balance. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. No deals. I have one bullet, and one enemy. We all go together.” I closed my eyes and heard Sean’s voice in my mind. You can’t save everyone, Haley.
Aslan stood angrily, looking at me. “And what guarantees were you equipped to make? You come here, to the center of my power, at the height of my narrative, and negotiate against me? ” He was genuinely indignant. “Who are you, woman, without that ring on your finger?” I felt a tingle, looked down. My smallest claw was suddenly visible again, through the ring-gate. Oh no. He’d done something to it. I checked- yep, cut off from the wish engine. He snorted, contemptuously. “Little more than human.”
Oh, that tore it. I needed more time but I just had to hope, without my cell phone connection, that Captain Roy had carried out my orders. I supposed it was time to grandstand, in the best tribute to my husband I could manage. I stood to my fullest height and willed my presence outward, captivating them both. “Who am I? Other than a twenty ton fire-breathing lizard with an arsenal of half the spells in a game about combat on my back? I’ll tell you, you jumped-up excuse for a fucking throw rug. Not once have you used my name. Dragon, Whore of Babylon, ‘Adversary.’ You called my husband by name , but you have a problem looking women in the eye, don’t you, Aslan. ” I stopped pacing, and stepped forward, towards him. The Colonel, seeing our stalemate broken, mashed his thumb on the detonator- and nothing happened. Roy came through, then. Somewhere down below he had removed the keys, or ripped out the transmitter, or done something to keep that bomb from blowing. One threat defused. Now it was my turn.
I stalked forward until I was eye to eye, staring Aslan down. Setting a stage. “Who am I?! A hero to a broken world. A wife to a murdered husband. A narrator who knows her story’s stronger than yours. The only person who came to this standoff with friends.” He twitched, at that, and I knew I had him. We were face to face, inches apart. “My name is Haley, you son of a bitch. You’re going to die choking on it.” He blinked. He blinked. And violence happened.
---
Elsewhere
---
The entire tower kicked like the belly of an expectant mother. Randall Flagg paused for a moment in his ascent up the primary stairs. His arm ached where that near-nuclear dagger had burned a hand clean off- he had not had time to take care of it. The soldiers hauling the irate and struggling children patiently paused behind him. When no fireball followed the bucking of the stone, he giggled madly and did a little jig on the landing. “Guess they’re really hitting it off, down there! Hurry hurry kids, got to get this show on the road!”
Skylar shook her head free of the guards long enough to bite out, “What do you even care, you- you jerk ? You want them to kill each other, why does it matter if we sit on some stupid chairs?”
Randall gestured, and the column resumed. The stairs were endless - well, not quite, but they felt that way. There were no elevators in this place, and the climb was exhausting. “Stories and stories again, kiddo! This tower could be a lot of things, from the right perspective. Aslan’s not the only one with an interest in architecture! But if you don’t reach the top then it doesn’t matter, to me, if it blows or not. It also won’t matter if you take a long tumble down all these cold, hard steps, so get moving.” The men manhandling the kids shoved them all forward, and at long last they rounded the final landing and came to the doors of the throne room. With his good hand Randall fingered the ring in his pocket- the gate he’d stolen off of a dead man, the back door he’d used to taunt a woman into murderous rage not so long ago. It felt unusually heavy.
The air felt like they were miles up, or more, and the doors were certainly heavenly in their ornamentation. Fifteen feet tall, covered with gilt and scrollwork, they stood open and inviting, giving a glimpse into the room beyond. A vaulted chamber occupied this whole floor of the tower, flanked with arched galleries and balconies such that it was practically open to the air outside. They could smell the fire and debris of the war, far below, though the crack-crack of gunfire no longer reached them up here. In the room’s center, lit from above by a massive stained-glass dome, stood a raised dais and four stone thrones. Unlike everything else in the room they were simple, undecorated, almost ominous. “Unclaimed,” said Randall, with approval. He ushered the children in.
Before they could be forced into sitting, a voice rang out. It came from everywhere in the room, and nowhere. Skylar jumped and shouted in joy- she recognized it. The Wiltshire Dog. “Unclaimed, but not undefended. You seek the Beam, Man In Black. You should not have mentioned towers when you taunted your victim. She stole a march on you, you’ll find nothing here.” The tower shook again with the impacts of a titanic struggle unfolding far below.
Flagg muttered to himself, “So she did have a plan. Dangerous, that one. Learning the ropes.”
Raising his voice, he called back to the disembodied presence, “Shows what you know, Krypto! The world thins, up here. Just ‘cuz Aslan says it’s a tower don’t mean it’s his tower unless he wins! And if it’s mine…”
The Dog finished his thought. “It will carry the beam, and you will destroy it, as you always do.”
Flagg nodded. “That’s the dance, partner. I’ll keep stepping it until it’s done. Now, put up or shut up. You’ve got nothing to threaten me with.” He gestured again and the soldiers began hauling the children forward. They shouted in anger and tried to struggle free but it was no use.
“Nothing?” asked the Dog’s voice, growing in size and strength but still seeming to come from every direction. “What are the Cheshires, if not threshold guardians? And what is a threshold if not the door between one place…” the arched galleries began to warp, multiplying out in a dizzying mirrored array into infinity, “...and another?” The dais was impossibly far away now, and the room was fast-filling with a mist that blocked all sight. “You said it yourself, Man In Black. The world is thin, here. So thin you could step right through.”
The children fell to their knees, suddenly devoid of their captors, all lost in the mist. “Stay where you are!” yelled Skylar, “Don’t go wandering or you might fall off a balcony!”
Flagg, for his part, didn’t listen. He stumbled forward, waving the mist out of the way. “God damn dog, I’m gonna make a new pair of boots out of you,” he snarled, to no avail. He found himself in front of a door and, lacking any alternative, went through it.
He stood on a ridgeline, staring down across a vast prairie of unfamiliar grasses. A storm was rolling in across the horizon. He recognized none of it, and stood for a minute, puzzled by the scene. Then a voice came from behind him. That, he recognized all too well from a recent debate. “Hello, Randall.” It took on a conspiratorial tone. “I threw that stabbing, you know.”