Justice is really just an afterthought. In its highest form it produces honor, a deliberate adherence to the virtues of living a just life. More often though justice is subjective. What one experiences as justice is purposefully blind and impartial in an effort to be fair. It presumes that nature or that the gods created all men in a way that makes them naturally equal. Equality is the true goal of justice, to form a circumstance in which each is given a fair chance regardless of nature. Regardless of the gods.

"You have doomed this world. As far as I know this existence is the root of all others and now it is the last." Aidan sounded frantic. "You are a destroyer, girl. You are the ruinous one." his flailing and kicking and shouting dissolved into whimpers and curled up on the floor.

"I was brought here by a man with far more courage than you." Svetlana did not flinch or look away. She had now seen too much to be disturbed or frightened anymore. She had grown as hard and as cold as the thing that was inside her. And she was just as brave.

She left him there and wondered if she should kill him. He was in the palace of marble, Aidan's home and she had left this behind her as she went outside and breathed deep. She was truly home now, this world of Ruin was her world and she was going to make it right. She knew this now.

"Father." she called up her newest ghost in her entourage of the dead. He stepped out from behind some broken pillar and rubble around it to stand before her in bedraggled and shameful despondency. How he felt was not how she felt. She had known all the lows of depression and hopelessness. All that was gone now. "I am sorry about what happened."

"It wasn't your fault. I was the one who made that thing. Aidan tried to help me to control it. How could you have stopped it?" Arvil's ghost spoke slowly and distantly. Of all her ghosts, only this one did not make her cry at the sight of it. He deserved to be dead and was a better man as a memory.

"Aidan knows a lot about making things that cannot be controlled." Svetlana said to the ghost. "He made Solariel and Telamon and who-knows-what else. I am starting to remember meeting him before. He knew mother and he knew Ronald. You knew him too. Why should you have listened to him?"

"If I had listened I'd still be alive." Arvil told his daughter. She didn't care for this response and walked through his ghost, dissipating it away.

She realized she should definitely kill Aidan and turned around to go back into his home. Above the entrance were the words carved into the stone beam:

"Ars Vox Populi, Vox Dei" and she knew not what those words meant as she read them out-loud. When she found her victim laying there in disarray she asked first: "What does it mean?"

Her shadow loomed with a killer's pose. She had armed herself with a stone club he had in his display of sculptures and art.

"What does." he sobbed miserably and tried to compose himself to speak to her: "What does what mean?"

"Vox Populi?" Svetlana asked while she stood looking down upon him.

"That is what I was. Don't you understand why I have done the things I have done? The voice of the people is the voice of God." Aidan struggled to be the man he stood as for a thousand years. He had never fallen down and cried helplessly. It took his understanding of all that had happened and all that was going to happen to become so dramatically defeated.

"You let Ronald die and you must have let others die too. You want me to see past that. It is only now that you try to reason with me." Svetlana stood over him.

"Perhaps that is because it is only now that I see any point in reasoning with you." Aidan sat up slowly.

"There is only one reason that will remain." Svetlana warned him. He realized she intended to slay him with the weapon she was holding. It was pretty obvious.

"Mine is peace. I kill for peace." Aidan confessed. His tears were real. He was broken. She felt different about slaughtering him.

"I don't want to kill you." Svetlana told him as she lowered her killing strike slowly.

"If you don't kill me now I will help you. I give you my word." Aidan swore. He wasn't prepared to defend himself. He had cast his fate onto the foot of her judgement and he was face down holding her calves beneath her. He was truly broken.

"I do need your help." Svetlana sighed.

They sat for a time together on the great porch of his palace and watched the sun setting upon the ruins.

"How is your home intact among such destruction?" Svetlana asked.

"There is much I need to explain to you. Many secrets do I have, but you have raised me back up. I belong to you now. So do my secrets." Aidan was slow in his speaking. The sight of Umbraeon and the hopelessness her presence represented to him had disturbed him into some kind of pocket personality. All of his power was gone.

"Then explain. And I say to you that you need not fear me. I will learn to control it." Svetlana promised.

"Were I dead, that would not be possible." Aidan began his explanation by saying something most cryptic.

"Why?"

"Because I am the only one left who understands what you are and how to deal with it." Aidan told her something that was only partially true so he added. "I am the only one left that wants to help you. Kaira and a few others would understand. They are worse off than me though."

"I see. So you could have helped me, instead of what you did." Svetlana took note of that.

"Help you destroy the world? You are the Apostate as far as I am concerned. Without you the danger we face is finite. You will always cause the end of the world. Any world." Aidan tried to explain, but did not start at the beginning. It was too far back to go.

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"That is why Kaira wanted me to meet Solariel."

"She meant nothing personal." Aidan replied.

"I understand. Now tell me, how can I control it? This being within me, Silver Swordsman, can battle against the enemies we face out there." Svetlana argued and demanded.

"Those enemies installed themselves as the pillars that uphold our world." Aidan said simply. They both sat in silence and gathering darkness as she began to finally understand.

"Apostate." she realized.

"I am sorry. And now I am too because I have cast my lot with yours." Aidan beleaguered her.

"There is one thing I have learned: then it is to remain faithful when one is being tested against hopeless circumstances." Svetlana wasn't discouraged. She was actually very glad to have her worst opponent take her side and agree to make her capable of doing what he had feared she always could do.

"So that is why." Aidan nodded as if he now understood something that he had no way to grasp before. His mental tenacity was not lost.

"Why I am the Apostate? Because I am a true Believer." Svetlana grimaced. She had already realized this in her heart, thoughtlessly. She often knew facts intuitively before she realized them consciously.

Something was coming in the night. Footfalls of something heavy.

"What is that?" Svetlana's eyes widened.

"Telamon." Aidan decided. "Come for you. It is under orders to destroy you. It wasn't far from here and you were spotted by my surveillance."

"You aren't going to betray your word?" Svetlana stood over him again.

"I've always kept my word and almost never gave it." Aidan shook his head 'no'.

"Then call it off." she ordered him.

"If I do then something worse will come for all of us. The Apostate is an existential threat. We will face Voxim. That is beyond my command." Aidan got up and walked over to a stone basin of water and gently waved his hand over it to activate it. An image of Telamon was displayed by his will and he halted it with ease.

"How long?" Svetlana asked him.

"Minutes. Years." Aidan shrugged. "If I communicate with Voxim we run the risk of making it aware of something it might have overlooked already. You walked around with impunity because I never made it aware of you. It wasn't necessary and I cannot control this one machine."

"I see." Svetlana understood. "Do you think it knows we are here?"

"Well now that you ask. I am just about certain."

"Years?" Svetlana raised an eyebrow at him.

"You are the optimist, but it serves you to offer you the possibility."

"Don't be an ass." she walked through the house and looked out of a window she could see the machine from. Her new companion was right behind her.

"Tell it to fight alongside Silver Swordsman." she stared at it in the moonlight and instructed him.

"I already did."

"Aidan?" Svetlana turned around and looked at him. He slowly raised his head to meet her gaze.

"We are together now, I hope you realize that."

"You are together. I am just with you. I have watched my last hopes die once too many times."

"Do you mean my father?"

"That was my fault. Better that I had gotten shot." Aidan was sorry for Arvil's death. It was the killing blow to his sanity. His eyes burned with the spark of madness.

"No. You can teach me to...whatever it is I must do to make Silver Swordsman." Svetlana disagreed with his self-assessment. She needed him, apparently.

"Sit down and close your eyes." he told her. He began to help her to relax and meditate and to visualize Silver Swordsman. It helped that she had a doll of it sitting in her lap. She had carried this across worlds, sometimes as an object, sometimes as a thought. But always it was with her.

"Now try to forget." Aidan instructed her. "Forget it isn't physically here."

As though a ghost she could feel its presence. She tried to forget, to know it and to forget it at the same time. It took tremendous concentration. She could hear Aidan laughing victoriously.

"Where am I?" Silver Swordsman asked.

Svetlana opened her eyes. It had worked. Aidan had guided her through it and she had guided this one ghost back into reality. Nothing seemed impossible as the machine stood there in the hall they sat in.

"Come." Svetlana stood and led her companions outside where Telamon stood. Silver Swordsman had to crawl to get under the archways, but soon was outside and standing at its full height. Telamon stood over the smaller giant robot.

"It is you again." Silver Swordsman recognized the machine that had killed it.

"You are back from the dead." Svetlana told Silver Swordsman proudly. "And so is hope. Will you fight for this world?"

"I will fight for this world." Silver Swordsman could feel the hope in both humans empowering it. Some kind of light reflected off of it where it stood ready and filled with hope.

"I will help, I have always fought for this world." Telamon claimed.

"I will need your help." Silver Swordsman's grid face reflected something huge and powerful flying towards them. It was a machine unlike any that they had seen, far more advanced and powerful than the giant robots on the ground.

"Solariel and Telamon were my creations and I brought them here with me. That thing I brought also, but it is from a world it can no longer defend." Aidan pointed.

"Any more surprises?" Svetlana frowned.

"If it is defeated then we will face Umbraeon and worse. Only the power of its voice keeps such awfulness away."

"And that is why you were our enemy." Svetlana realized. If they won they would lose. Now it was time for faith, she believed.

"The shields." Aidan brightened and ran inside to a control panel for his shields. It was not activated a moment too soon. Rockets sped ahead of the flying warrior. These impacted against the shielding and detonated.

Soon it was on the ground and its wings folded out of the way of its arms and legs. Voxim stood up straight and towered over the other two giant robots. It strode forward with intent and menace until it struck the shield. It pushed on it and slowly forced its way through. The shields faltered and faded after the penetration caused a surge.

"Apostate." Voxim recognized the cabal of enemies before it. Its world was destroyed by such as these and now it wanted revenge.

Voxim, Telamon and Silver Swordsman stood in the same place, the mightiest machine combatants that had ever existed. The three giant robots all took stride towards each other, ready for battle. The ground shook violently and the explosion of their impact resounded like rolling thunder. With an ax Voxim charged forward and with one mighty swing it took off one of Telamon's arms and the hammer-wielding giant robot staggered and fell.

Silver Swordsman had struck the armor with all its strength and left a blazed wound on Voxim. Telamon got to its feet and fought with just the one arm and alongside Silver Swordsman. The two machines were not a match for Voxim and blow after blow from the ax began to bash its enemies into defeat.

Aidan watched from a window of his home he had dashed to. The battle first went in favor of Voxim. Suddenly the two empathicals leapt upon their greater adversary. Voxim began to stagger backwards as horrific blasts rocked its body while they struck deadly wounds upon it.

Svetlana fell to her knees in her effort to infuse the empathicals with enough energy to make it through. She was giving them everything, refusing to hold back. A mighty crash shook the ground as she fell over.

Aidan emerged to find Silver Swordsman and Telamon had toppled the giant and were on top of it smashing and stabbing it to death. Blue flames began to erupt from its wounds and they jumped down from the corpse of the machine. Voxim lay dead.

Svetlana lay motionless. Aidan walked to her and lifted her. He took her inside and beheld her fading, dying. When her life-energies were gone she would no longer exist. This would be his fate too, when he died.

"It is okay to die." he told her.

She smiled at him knowing he now believed. It was just a spark of belief. She was happy as her own existence ceased. Soon she was gone. Aidan stood alone in his home. He spoke aloud to her memory.

"I will live for you."