BOOK 3 - PROLOGUE

“Time will come for me.” The old man’s voice was a painful rasp as he pushed the words from his teeth, the pain like knives cutting the inside of his throat. “It came for them, it will come for me.”

Time will come for me.

These five words had become his mantra. They were the first words he had uttered upon regaining the ability to speak, a hoarse whisper after months of living in a corpse-like stasis. He spoke to no one but himself, but the act itself was a necessary defiance. He lived, and the world would know of it.

Like the heartbeat of his obsession, he had repeated this phrase over and over, swaying back and forth as he hung like an ornament from his moving prison.

But a prison no longer, he reminded himself. Now, an instrument. The creature he was strapped to, laughingly named a ‘Progenitor’ by his enemies, lumbered forth on a course it thought it was setting for itself. The best tools always thought they were their own masters.

The strange world of the Hammer Dungeon moved around him, shifting walls of color and light. The details were blurry and out of focus, but he was not concerned. His vision was still returning after his near-death, but it improved each day. Truth be told, his eyesight had already declined centuries past, though he had been loath to admit it. He had augmented it with low level arcane methods, but even weak cantrips such as those were not currently available.

All his limited power was focused in one direction, powering the psychic connection he had forged with the Progenitor and its nearby kin. There were eight of them thus far – a general, three engineers, and four soldiers. Not yet an army, but it was a start.

He had been pushed to the edge of the board by lesser players, but he had not fallen over. Clarity had come to him in his near-defeat, and the path to his true goal was finally taking shape.

“Time came for them.” His weak voice barely echoed against the dark stone of the dungeon, a thin rasp as insubstantial as fluttering cobwebs. They were fools, his old enemies. But they had been more cunning than he had thought. “Time will come for me.”

They had been arch mages just as he, thinking themselves powerful beyond harm or fear. But he had pierced their arrogance with his own, proving their embers of power to be mere kindling. With the power of his superior will, in time he had shown them harm and taught them fear.

His battles against them had racked the mountains and sea itself with their power, raging for decades. When they were complete, only he was left standing. The last Arch Mage, the peerless and unchallengeable ruler of all the Realm.

‘The Old Bastard’ his subjects came to call him, and in private he had come to quite like the term. It was better even than Lurim, the name he had crafted for himself. The final incantation word of the spell that defeated his last opponents, sending them forever to another world. “Lurim” he had said to their shocked faces, and the fools had faded away.

Ixeldan had died that day. From then on, he intended to craft his own fate. Freed from the noise and cabal of thirteen other needs and desires, from then on there would be one will: his own. The pitiful mortals of this world could not touch him, and his last true rivals were banished.

Or so he had thought. It seemed that even he could be mistaken at times.

Though he had swept them off the stage, the other arch mages had not been defeated, as he had hoped. Cast into another world they would die in time, as entropy touches all. But not before they uplifted a race, modifying pitiful creatures from the same world he spawned the nascent dungeons upon. Insects, barely more than ants to his eyes. In their defeat, the other Arch Mages had crafted them into something extraordinary before passing from their wounds and time.

Now their own creations had conquered dozens of worlds, all while wearing their dead masters like powerful talismans. Devotion and worship had been built into the very essence of these creatures. But in that genetic reverence, in the very roots of the commands the Progenitors had been given, his enemies had planted the seeds of Lurim’s freedom.

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The other Arch Mages had known what was coming for them, even better than Lurim himself had foreseen. The deadly fingers of time touched everyone eventually, and made no exception for those who communed with the darker powers of magic. His aging had progressed so slowly, so imperceptibly. By the time he had realized time could affect even him, Lurim had already killed anyone who might be able to help him.

Or so he had thought, until he had met the Progenitors.

Woven into their very being, these insects had been given a simple goal by their creators. An instruction, a drive so core to every Progenitor that seeking it was as involuntary as breathing. Find a path to immortality. Not for themselves, but for their masters. Their gods, the Arch Mages.

The fact that the Arch Mages were now all dead seemed to have escaped the Progenitors, who continued on with their work unabated. They expanded relentlessly, conquering and stripping world after world, searching for a singular prize for their deceased masters. Questing for a vessel that could not be touched by the ravages of time, but contained the spark of consciousness needed to house their essence.

When Lurim had awoken, he had discovered with shock that the Progenitor’s target had been among him for centuries, scampering right under his nose. A defective gremlin, a simple-minded carrier of beakers and mixer of potions. Cast into the refuse furnace, this one aberration managed to survive due to his unlikely resistance to both fire and time itself.

The perfect vessel, tossed in a bin. To add to the bile growing in his throat, the little vermin had been part of the very group that infernal whelp Tarn Arisfal had led against him. He had been a mere stone’s throw away, but Lurim hadn’t seen him for what he was.

But the Progenitors knew of him. In their last scryes – their old Arch Mages had told their charges what and who to look for. Now, despite wielding enough power and ingenuity to overwhelm the sentient Dungeons and ravage dozens of worlds, they eschewed conquest for themselves and searched only for their dead master’s goals.

But Lurim was an Arch Mage too, and in this he had found his salvation.

The Progenitors had been taught to hate him, of course. He had endured months of that hatred, but the insects were wildly uncreative when it came to cruelty. Their hate had not been told to kill, so they simply froze him in a still-time cocoon. As they identified him as another Arch Mage, he was given the same ornamentation as his former magical comrades and assigned one of the generals to ‘bear’ him.

That had been his way in. Their minds were easy to whisper to once Lurim knew what to say. He was, after all, an arch mage. They had been programmed to find a vessel for the arch mages, and transfer their consciousness to it. Lurim assumed they’d be disappointed once they tried it and found all the Arch Mages were dead, but this need to fulfil their purpose was too core to be nuanced. They breathed, they conquered, they searched for the Prime.

And, with a series of whispers, he had convinced this Progenitor that he was the key to achieving this goal. That, in fact, the entire Progenitor race could not complete their sacred task without him.

As the creature carried him through the cold hallways of the Hammer dungeon, Lurim could sense his own creation’s loathing of him all around. Just as the old arch mages had created the Progenitors, so too he had created the Dungeons. Fourteen in all, one for each of his opponents.

At one time, he had planned to trap each of them in one of the sentient prisons, torturing them with combat after combat pulled from their own fears and nightmares. But the Dungeons had proven too troublesome to control, evolving and changing in ways even he had not anticipated. In time his goals for the other mages had become simpler and more final.

He had left the dungeons cast aside on the same world as the ants, and eventually his opponents had found both and put them to use.

Lurim had recently been within the Sword Dungeon, when that gnat Arisfal had managed to expose him to the Progenitors. Yet just as Lurim himself had done in the past, by defeating his opponent Tarn Arisfal had handed him the keys to survival and victory.

By whispering and waiting, he now had eight Progenitors under his sway. As his influence grew, his body was slowly returning to life. He could not yet move in any useful way, but while that too would pass, it was no real bother. His mind could think, and that was all he needed.

His mind could reach into the Progenitors, tapping the ancient connection his brethren had with them. It could follow the route of his old handiwork, burrowing into the sentience of the Dungeons and pulling the information he needed unseen from their thoughts.

He could even use his ties to his old world, invading the dreams of a pitiful monk who thought he was hearing the words of history itself. Herself, he reminded himself with a faint chuckle. The fool. Yarex had served his purpose, delivering Arisfal and the Prime where he needed them to go.

Silenced and frozen, he kept moving his pieces on the board. In time he would have the right Progenitors here, in the right dungeon, and then Tarn Arisfal would deliver the rest. Once Lurim’s mind and power were safely inside the gremlin, he would at last laugh in the face of his one true enemy.

Time would touch Lurim no longer, and the people of all worlds would discover what an ‘Old Bastard’ he really was. Starting with Tarn Arisfal.