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A modest chair sat in front of a sunken-in area full of abandoned maps and charts. The Jean’in were sell-swords. With the keep falling, the command staff had begun to flee with their war chests.

Richard was waiting, wearing his duster despite the stifling interior humidity.

“The tree was inspired,” he said. “Didn’t expect the cavemen to have the tools necessary to fell one of those things. Certainly not one tall enough and with enough mass to break the wall.”

Richard finished off a simple stick of common foreign jerky-rations. He downed it with a swig of wine.

“This world didn’t have wine, before we got here. Not on the core isles at least. Guess it’s the relative lack of fruit-bearing plants. The innovation just didn’t come to them. What a pain.”

It was just Richard alone in the proverbial throne room.

“Richard,” Michael said. “All of this. Why?”

“Well, a conglomerate of shareholders at a nearby trading isle in this wing of the archipelago required additional raw materials. A joint-stock venture was sent to one of the more remote, outlying isles to gather some whitewood in bulk. Since I knew the lay of the land and had some ties to the region, I volunteered to fund the entire venture – and then some – out of pocket.”

“There’s a whole, wide world out there,” Richard continued. “They had gunpowder in the form of signal flares and limited steam power on the larger islands. Nothing like what I managed to reverse-engineer after a year or two, though.”

“You’ve grown rich?” Michael asked.

“Unfathomably. Every ship on the trade routes uses one of my engines now. In less than twenty years I have allowed the core isles to skip the industrial revolution straight to a modern market economy. Now they have a standard of living comparable to the early-1900s back home.”

Richard smirked. “Anyway, the joint-stock venture was just a pretense, of course. And blessing this world with Earth inventions just pays the bills for my true passion. I could never forget this place. How we were marooned in this world, forced to trawl through the dirt and dodge carnivorous plants just for basic survival. And the locals, well, never did like them. Every spare moment of my life since I introduced proper rifling to the trade routes has been spent trying to find out just what the hell dragged us here.”

“We already put a stop to your experiments years ago,” Michael said.

“Yeah,” Rita said. “Stopped you from sacrificing… how many countless lives?”

“For a time, yes.” Richard hunched over, resting the pommel of a great hammer on the floor. “On the downlow, I manage to perfect some proofs of concept using the homeless population of one of the core islands. The disappearances briefly made the inter-island papers for a week or two. Anyway, I perfected the sacrificial toll required to transport people and objects both across space and reality… and, I’ve learned the exact toll that would be required to transport three buses worth of Texan good old boys from a lonely country road into the middle of this steaming, tropical shithole.”

“To that end, I bent the resource expedition to my own ends. Mission creep, technically; there wasn’t supposed to be more than one or two logging camps near the coast. The dam was inspired by our early adventures, as you no doubt guessed. But there are thousands, tens of thousands of low-caste knife-ears in the stormheaths alone. Removing them from the river basin isn’t strictly speaking part of the expedition’s mission, but the stockholders aren’t going to complain if a local insurgency can no longer assault their ports on a weekly basis. And as for recruiting the private army, there are plenty of unemployed types on any developed island who will sign up for a fat paycheck, a quick scrape against a technologically inferior enemy, and promise of farmsteads acquired in, shall we say, newly-cleared land.”

“You were going to cleanse the stormheaths of, well, stormlanders and give these mercenaries land grants?” Maat asked, incredulous.

“After clearing the whitewood forests for lumber, yes. Your son is very perceptive, Michael.” Rick chuckled to himself. “That’s not important right now. What’s important is that the mass death of a vulnerable population far from the prying eyes of humanitarian organizations in the core islands can be put to a very important use.”

Richard presented a bauble – a trinket, built of metal and streaked with red like blood. Crimson stones were imbedded in a strange, runic pattern near the center. The whole thing looked quite heavy yet was small enough to hold in Richard’s hand.

“By funneling a certain metaphysical mana component of the deaths in our ‘holding camps’ into a central point in this very room, I was able to perfect this. My key back home. The culmination of decades of work.”

“What are you planning?” Michael said.

“It’s already been done,” Richard said calmly. “The deaths of countless stormlanders, many handed over by their own clans, has powered this key. It's ninety-nine percent complete. And with just one more push, it can take all of us home. A bridge to cross back, then we never have to look at a damn centurion bird chicken wing again.”

There was a mighty war horn from outside. Not a stormlander one; this was mechanical. Bellowing, as if controlled by a machine.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Maat rushed to a window.

Five steamboats waited on the river. They’d cut off the eastern flank. While Aminia was countering, he could only do so much in the short time before the ships arrived on the battlefield and within firing range.

“These reinforcements should be enough to rout your war party,” Richard said. “I’ll have the forge priests activate this portal over your corpse, Michael. One final sacrifice. The rest of us can go home - whoever hasn’t gone native, at least.”

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Richard lunged without warning, the head of his war hammer flying in an arc through the air. Michael’s wooden war-club shattered on contact. The Quarterchief jumped back, pulled out some obsidian knives, and leapt back into the fray.

Their foe was just one man, but his forge-magic set his own hammer on fire and mighty swings repelled an entire war party of vengeance-hungry stormlanders.

“The artifacts of this forge-god are something else,” Richard said. “Twice as fast, many times stronger. I’m practically a one-man army. Time for round three."

“Richard!” The Quarterchief screamed, knives out.

"Michael!" Richard bellowed back, hammers sparking as they smashed together.

Obsidian knives hit Richard in the chest, and immediately bounced off, harmless. Beneath Richard’s duster was a black vest.

“Forgot about Kevlar?” Richard followed up with a haymaker that sent the Quarterchief backwards, stumbling towards the far wall.

Others charged; Rita used flash bangs to no effect, Maat swung a chipped war club he’d found on the floor and was backhanded away. Richard had his eyes focused intently on Michael, ravenous and ready to strike again and again.

A shot from a pilfered scattergun struck Richard in the vest, to no effect.

“Your hokey river gods and ancient war clubs are nothing next to the power of even basic industrial technology,” Richard said, and imbedded the pick-end of his war hammer into Michael’s shoulder.

There was a rush of water as a freak wave broke the keep wall down. Aminia was riding the wave, bow in hand.

Aminia fired off three shots at once. Michael held out a hand in a metal glove and the water instantly lost momentum on contact and collapsed to the floor.

“Stay away from him,” Aminia said with a surprisingly commanding voice for his build.

“Ah, the river god? Michael’s secret friend? I’ll kill you a second time.” Richard pulled the hammer out of Mike’s shoulder, who collapsed to the floor.

Richard was distracted. Now was Maat’s chance. He pulled a barb off his war bat and plunged it into Richard’s back, underneath the vest.

The stranger with the frayed ears gasped. “Felt that one. Impressive.”

Then, with forge-enhanced strength, Richard grabbed Maat by the face and flung him into Aminia. Aminia grabbed Maat rather than just let them both fall to the ground.

Richard swung his hammer, which Aminia blocked with his arm and a shield of compressed water. He swung again, to the same effect. The metal-gloved hand punched Aminia in the chest, dissipating the water and sending the river deity sprawling against a wall.

"Surely he can't just hope to fight us all off solo," Rita said from the wings, disbelieving.

Maat tried to get up but was held in place by one of Richard’s boots.

“I said your son was going to watch as I beat your skull in with this hammer,” Richard told Michael. “But if you insist, I can always do the brat in first. How do you like that, old buddy, ol’ pal?”

Just then, there was another war horn. Distant and lower-pitched, but decidedly Stormlander. There was shouting on the far banks.

“It’s the Laval,” Rita said, at first concerned, her eyes soon widened with shock and glee. “Hey, they’re attacking the Jean’in.”

Maat smiled, breathing easy for the first time since he'd entered the keep. Lionli had come through.

The boot left Maat’s back. Richard ran up to a nearby window. He let out a rasp.

Soon everyone was checking the windows. Lloyd helped Maat up, and they limped to the nearest opening together.

Outside, a near-endless stream of Laval warriors had hit the Jean’in back lines. Often just turning coat while standing side by side with the mercenaries. Some Laval waded out into the Torrent to get at the steamships. At the same time, canoes and commandeered steamships paddled downriver towards the Jean'in naval detachment -- the war party from the dam had arrived. There would be no foreign reinforcement of the keep.

“Richard. It’s over.” Michael said, panting.

“You have no more reason to fight,” Maat said, nodding.

Richard let out a slow laugh, which soon rose in intensity.

“Never was one to know when to quit.” Richard presented the bauble, then imbedded it deep into his chest, over the heart.

“Mend to flesh.” He said, invoking a familiar forge-magic. “Do not release until I am dead.”

Richard grinned like a terror-bird through gritted teeth.

“Your ticket home is over my corpse, Michael. All of you! You’ll all use this portal, damn the toll used to make it. It would be foolish to just bury this, when it’s already been prepared. Kill me. Open the portal home, and be forever compromised, Michael.”

Richard’s hammer was set alight with blue flames that scalded at a distance. His duster caught on fire. His forearms burned. He charged anyway, aiming to land the killing blow on Michael before his injuries or the horde around him could kill him instead.

Michael blocked with a war club, which shattered to splinters. Parried with another, which also broke in half.

Rita splintered Richard’s left arm with a fragmentation grenade. Lloyd and Sara pelted him with hand-slings and a thrown rock to kill his momentum.

Three water arrows pierced through Richard’s vest of this mysterious kevlar. Maat hit Rick with a full-force war-bat to the face. Lastly, Michael’s final, jagged war club imbedded itself deep in Richard’s left shoulder, horizontally. It stopped only when it hit the portal-bauble near Richard’s heart, with a dull thud.

“Do you…” Richard exhaled, breath smelling of cinders, rot, and blood. “Do you know what caused our portal accident, all those years ago?”

Michael neither said a word nor moved his head.

“Rats. A group of cheesemakers on one of the core islands tried ridding their island of rats. Mass death spell. Only the sheer number of casualties of the little bastards had… unforeseen effects some thousands of miles away. Opened a portal between here and a little section of route 218 back in good ol’ Texas, and in we fell.” Richard let out a sickly, phlegmatic laugh. “Complete accident. No grand summons or destined calling. It was all just a random fluke, man.”

The portal key fell from its imbedded perch as Richard let out one last, ragged laugh. The corpse continued to smolder, and eventually burn to ash, even after the hammer’s blue flames dissipated.

Quarterchief Michael held the fell portal key in one hand, weighing it.

“You could’ve recreated the portal and gone home any time you wanted sacrificing just an island’s worth of rats?” Michael said after the corpse had turned a charred black. “And yet all this, just to prove, what? It’s just. It was all. Just. Psycho shit.”

Michael repeated this last bit again twice more. He turned, never looking upon the corpse again, and ran off to help Aminia to his feet.

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